Complete telomere‐to‐telomere assemblies of two sorghum genomes to guide biological discovery

Abstract

Cultivated sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) is a C4crop well‐known for its high efficiency of biomass accumulation and adaptation to drought and hot environments. It is a staple food for half a billion people in Africa and Asia and provides a major source of feed, fiber, and biofuel globally. The release of the first sorghum reference genome of BTx623 greatly accelerated functional genomics studies in sorghum and related C4grasses [1]. Subsequent improvement has further enhanced the quality of the reference genome [2]. Assemblies of other sorghum genomes such as Tx430, Rio, and wild sorghum accessions have shown marked intra-specific sequence variation in this crop [3, 4]. However, all of the available sorghum genomes are still incomplete, in particular with unresolved centromeres and telomeres, constraining a full understanding of the genomic landscape in the sorghum gene pool.