Institut für Pflanzenbau und Bodenkunde
The aim of SORGHUM is the utilization of another C4 plant for plant production in Germany in order to actively contribute to C sequestration in the sense of climate protection through higher humus reproduction and at the same time to substantially increase the resource efficiency of plant production. In order to achieve the necessary chilling tolerance and adapted maturity behavior, plant cultivation and plant genetic determinants of adaptation are to be determined, which will be used as aids in practical cultivation and as a tool for selection decisions in the breeding process. As a result, this will enable rapid and widespread establishment of sorghum. The project is expected to catalyze sorghum cultivation, and benefit from revolutionary developments in plant genetics (sequence availability, genome-wide markers, prediction models). Using training populations to be studied and genome-wide marker information, genomic prediction models for chilling tolerance, early maturity, yield, total C fixation, and crop residue biomass will be developed. By using process-based crop growth models that represent the entire soil-plant-atmosphere system in daily time steps and simulating different sorghum genotypes in different growing regions over many years, yield potential, soil C sequestration, and nitrous oxide emissions during the growing season will be evaluated. By means of comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, the potentials for climate protection are to be analyzed comprehensively and made usable in a correspondingly more targeted manner.
