Revolutionizing Hybrid Sorghum Breeding with Genomic Prediction and TFMSA for Early-Generation B-Lines

  • SorghumBase Team
  • 18 December 2023

Commercial sorghum is grown as hybrids in the United States. The A1 cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) system is used to produce hybrid seeds. Development of new seed parents (A/B-lines) in sorghum is more difficult and time consuming than the development of new R-lines, which have resulted in reduced diversity of these parent lines relative to the R-line germplasm. A significant issue is that effective testcrossing is very difficult until late in the development of the A/B-lines. Inducing temporal male sterility allows for early generation testing of B-lines in hybrid combinations. Trifluoromethanesulfonamide (TFMSA) effectively induces male sterility in B-lines (Hodnett and Rooney 2018) and can be used to produce hybrids for yield testing (Kyanam et al. 2021). Kent and colleagues from Texas A&M University, Southern Plains Agricultural Research Center, and the USDA-ARS studied the efficacy of genomic prediction of grain yield days (GY) and days to mid-anthesis (DY) with TFMSA produced testcross hybrids from two sorghum B-line RIL populations (BTx623/BTx642 and BTx623/BTx378). The researchers testcrossed 434 hybrids from these populations across five environments and evaluated three cross-validation (CV) schemes to assess the accuracy of genomic prediction in each location. The prediction accuracies of the cross-validation (CV) schemes showed no significant differences across various environments. Analysis revealed that merging the B-line populations could enhance prediction accuracies. Remarkably, the genomic prediction models effectively ranked the bottom 70% of hybrids, even when the genomic prediction accuracies were modest. These findings underscore the utility of integrating genomic prediction models and TFMSA technology in assisting breeders in forecasting B-line hybrid performance in initial generations, before the demanding process of creating A/B-line pairs.

SorghumBase Examples:

Figure 1: A chromosome-wide breakdown of the locations of features associated with grain yield based on the meta-analysis of 146 studies reporting QTL map locations available in the Sorghum QTL Atlas.

 

Figure 2: A representative list of QTLs associated with grain weight. See the full list of associated QTLs here.

 

Figure 3: A chromosome-wide breakdown of the locations of features associated with grain yield based on the meta-analysis of 146 studies reporting QTL map locations available in the Sorghum QTL Atlas.

 

Figure 4: A representative list of QTLs associated with days to anthesis. See the full list of associated QTLs here.

Reference: 

Hodnett GL, Rooney WL. Male sterility induction of sorghum using chemical hybridizing agent TFMSA, trifluoromethanesulfonamide. Canadian Journal of Plant Science. 2018 Oct;98(5): 1102-1108. doi: 10.1139/cjps-2017-0327.

Kent MA, Fonseca JMO, Klein PE, Klein RR, Hayes CM, Rooney WL. Use of genomic prediction to screen sorghum B-lines in hybrid testcrosses. Plant Genome. 2023 Sep;16(3):e20369. PMID: 37455349. doi: 10.1002/tpg2.20369. Read more

Kyanam AN, Hodnett GL, Rooney WL. Analysis of effects of trifluoromethanesulfonamide in Sorghum inbred lines and their derived hybrids. Crop Science. 2021 Jun; 61: 3507–3515. doi.org/10.1002/csc2.20580.

Related Project Websites: 

William Rooney’s page at Texas A&M: https://soilcrop.tamu.edu/people/rooney-william/