Miscanthus: a case study for the utilization of natural genetic variation

Abstract

Cultivars of Miscanthus used as bioenergy crops or tested in trials are largely clonally propagated, wild sourced genotypes or clonally propagated F1 hybrids. One of the most productive taxa is the sterile triploid M. £ giganteus. Little domestication or breeding has been undertaken and there is huge potential to utilize the extensive genetic resources of the genus for crop improvement. The challenge is to generate new highly adapted genotypes suitable for a range of environments. Production on marginal land, not used for food crops, is particularly desirable, but presents many barriers to crop breeders, as these are largely unproductive and/or stressful environments. This article outlines progress made in characterizing natural genetic variation in Miscanthus including next-generation single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, quantitative trait locus analysis and association mapping. It also explains how this knowledge is being used to develop novel genotypes suited for growth in a broad range of agricultural and marginal lands by defining breeding pools, generating novel crosses, manipulating polyploidy and applying genomic selection approaches.

Breeding progress and preparedness for mass‐scale deployment of perennial lignocellulosic biomass crops switchgrass, miscanthus, willow and poplar

“…Germplasm collections specifically to support breeding for biomass started in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom (Clifton-Brown, Schwarz, & Hastings, 2015). These collections have continued with successive expeditions from European and US teams assembling diverse collections from a wide geographic range in eastern Asia, including from China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Taiwan (Hodkinson, Klaas, Jones, Prickett, & Barth, 2015;Stewart et al, 2009). Three key miscanthus species for biomass production are M. sinensis, M. floridulus and M. sacchariflorus.…”

Ecological characteristics andin situgenetic associations for yield-component traits of wildMiscanthusfrom eastern Russia

“…We will refer to this clone as M. Âgiganteus '1993-1780' in reference to its accession number in the Kew Living Collection. Miscanthus is more temperate adapted (growing as far as 50 N in Russia; Hodkinson et al, 2015) than its C 4 relatives sugarcane, sorghum and maize, yet M. Âgiganteus '1993-1780' originated from sub-tropical southern Japan (35 N, assuming origination from Yokohama; Greef et al, 1997) and is therefore unlikely to represent the maximum cold tolerance of the genus . Insufficient winter hardiness has been documented for first-year plantings of M. Âgiganteus '1993-1780' in parts of northern Europe, whereas better winter hardiness was observed in other Miscanthus accessions (Clifton-Brown and Lewandowski, 2000;Farrell et al, 2006).…”

Assembly of 23 Plastid Genomes Provides the Chloroplast View onMiscanthusOrigins

“…In contrast to the combined phylogeny presented by Hodkinson et al (2015) the chloroplast phylogeny places the clade formed by Miscanthus sacchariflorus and Miscanthus lutarioriparius as the earliest diverging (the Hodkinson et al (2015) paper places a Miscanthus olygostachyus clade as the earliest diverging). The phylogeny presented in this paper also shows clear evolutionary divergence between Miscanthus sacchariflorus and Miscanthus sacchariflorus subsp.…”

“…There has, however, been no large-scale analysis of the phylogenetic relationship of Miscanthus species, with the largest phylogram to date being an integrated image presented by Hodkinson et al (2015) which was, itself based on three original studies Hodkinson et al (2002a,b,c) and Swaminathan et al (2010) It should be noted that the exact origins of Miscanthus ×giganteus may be in doubt, as no complete chloroplast genomes have been published. Rather, M. ×giganteus has only been shown to have the plastid type of M. sacchariflorus (Hodkinson et al (2002a,b) and De (2012).…”