Success tastes sweet | Sugarcane's complex genetic code has been cracked
The full sugarcane genome has finally been revealed. The results of work to sequence the plant, which accounts for 80% of the sugar produced worldwide, were published in Nature on 27 March. The five-year operation was the fruit of international collaboration between CIRAD (France), the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) (United States) and CSIRO and QAAFI (Australia).
After rice, sorghum, maize, banana and wheat, sugarcane is the latest crop with a complete genome. Until now, it was the last major crop without one. And not without reason, since its genome is the most complex: there are at least 12 copies of each chromosome, and a total of 114 chromosomes!
Reference
Healey, A.L., Garsmeur, O., Lovell, J.T. et al. The complex polyploid genome architecture of sugarcane . Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07231-4
Read more
https://www.cirad.fr/en/press-area/press-releases/2024/sugarcane-genome-sequence
Published: 08/04/2024