Morphological and molecular diversity analyses of high biomass sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench)

Smart crop sorghum [Sorghum bicolor L. Moench] is the 5th most significant grain crop grown around the globe in marginal land supplementing feedstuff, biofuel and fodder apart from food. Sorghum is considered as an ideal candidate for bioenergy production due to its small genome size, drought tolerance, increased production and potential as biofuel crop. For biomass studies Sorghum germplasm has a higher genetic diversity at molecular and morphological levels so markers assisted breeding has broad applications. To identify genomic diversity of sorghum, SSR markers can be used in breeding techniques. In current research we used morphological characters and molecular markers for evaluating the sorghum genotypes and potential of sorghum to produce a higher yield of biomass. The phenotypic data of diverse germplasm of sorghum for four traits including plant height, stem thickness, number of nodes and internodal length was recorded. PCA analysis specified highly significant differences among all the traits. These traits showed positive correlation and thus used for efficient screening of best performing sorghum accessions. The molecular screening of selected sorghum genotypes was done by using ten SSR primers. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 1 to 2 and the allelic polymorphism information content (PIC) value ranged from 0 to 0.3750 for the Xtxp101. The results revealed that sorghum genotypes differed for morphological characters and this diversity was also indicated by SSR markers. In breeding programs these genomic groups of sorghum may be used for development of efficient energy and high biomass of sorghum.