Objectifs

The focal species of this project are rice and sorghum, two well-known crops in Montpellier, which cumulate extreme food security and economic importance, biological simplicity and representativeness.

Rice is the most advanced in terms of genomics and sorghum is quickly catching up. We shall use these two crops and expand the ongoing Northern-Southern partnership to help reinforce capacity for bio‐analysis in Africa. Using large rice data sets and new methods combining population genetics and phylogenetics, we are developing whole genome representations of haplotype lineages related to distinct founders through domestication, admixture and introgression. We use this information to sharpen our capacity to detect signatures of selection in the genome. In sorghum, we shall mobilize data and resources, both international and internal, to apply rice‐validated methods to relate multiple levels of diversity, namely genetic, phenotypic, geographic and ethnological diversity. Pairing the two crops is expected to be very efficient, not only to reinforce the theoretical background in terms of optimal methodologies to detect adaptive variation but also to refine the genomic regions of adaptive importance.