ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Functional and Applied Plant Genomics

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1629615

This article is part of the Research TopicStress Tolerance in Sorghum: Molecular Mechanisms, Gene Discovery, and Quality DynamicsView all 4 articles

Association mapping and candidate gene identification for drought tolerance in sorghum

Provisionally accepted
Huiting MinHuiting Min1,2Kang WangKang Wang1,2Tiantian WangTiantian Wang1,2Xinxiu ChengXinxiu Cheng1,2Ephrem HabyarimanaEphrem Habyarimana3Yongfei WangYongfei Wang1,2Die HuDie Hu1,2Yi-Hong WangYi-Hong Wang4*Lihua WangLihua Wang1,2*
  • 1Anhui Science and Technology University, Fengyang, Anhui, China
  • 2International Joint Research Center of Forage Bio-Breeding in Anhui Province, Chuzhou, China
  • 3The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru 502324, Telangana, India, India
  • 4Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504, United States

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Water is essential for plant growth and drought is one of the most predominant constraints on crop yield. Sorghum is a well-known drought tolerant crop model and sorghum landraces possess novel alleles for local adaptation. In this study, we evaluated the sorghum mini core panel of 239 globally sampled landraces for shoot and root growth under drought conditions simulated by 10%/20% polyethylene glycol (PEG) in 2020 and 2024 and measured drought tolerance by Seedling Tolerance Coefficient (STC). Phenotypic analysis showed that more accessions produced more roots than longer roots when exposed to 10% PEG, but at 20% PEG, more accessions produced longer roots than more roots, reflecting the adaptability of some accessions to drought stress. However, PEG reduced shoot growth in all accessions in both years. Genomewide association study (GWAS) on 33 32 growth and 19 STC traits identified 22 loci, 19 of which were mapped to the STC traits and 17 of the 19 to STC of shoot weight. Eleven of the 22 loci are were colocated with 23 previously mapped drought related QTLs; 15 of these 23 QTLs were either mapped to green leaf area, total number of green leaves or chlorophyll content. We also found 19 candidate genes for 12 of the 22 loci. Five of those genes show either preferential or specific expression in the roots according to GeneAtlas v2. One candidate gene from a locus colocated with a previously mapped chlorophyll fluorescence QTL has been shown to increase chlorophyll fluorescence in maize in another study. Based on the response of root length and dry weight, we identified IS 30533 as the most tolerant and IS 32439 as the most sensitive accession.Results from this study lays foundation to further characterize the sorghum mini core panel for novel drought tolerance genes.

Keywords: Sorghum, mini core, GWAS, snps, drought tolerance, candidate genes

Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Min, Wang, Wang, Cheng, Habyarimana, Wang, Hu, Wang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Yi-Hong Wang, Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504, United States
Lihua Wang, Anhui Science and Technology University, Fengyang, Anhui, China

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Supplementary Material