REVIEW article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1665967
This article is part of the Research TopicStress Tolerance in Sorghum: Molecular Mechanisms, Gene Discovery, and Quality DynamicsView all 5 articles
Sorghum as a Monocot Model for Drought Research
Provisionally accepted
- 1Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
- 2PLANeT BIOTECH, Edifici Eureka, Campus UAB (Cerdanyola del Vallès), 08193, Barcelona, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Climate change is intensifying drought events, posing a major threat to global food security. Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench (Sorghum), a C4 monocot grass, is emerging as a valuable model for drought research due to its natural tolerance to water limitation and adaptability to semi-arid and arid environments. Sorghum cultivation requires significantly less water than major cereals such as rice, maize, and wheat, making it an attractive crop for sustaining agricultural productivity under water-limiting conditions. In fact, Sorghum uses up to 34% less water than rice in rainfed systems and up to 50% less under irrigation, with rice-to-Sorghum substitution potentially reducing water demand by 33%. Its lower water requirements, along with the compact growth of commonly used accessions such as TX430 and BTx623, make Sorghum a practical system for experimentation, particularly in genome editing studies. Maize, which shares close genetic similarity and also belongs to the Panicoideae subfamily, could particularly benefit from Sorghum-based insights. Sorghum also overcomes key limitations of model species such as Arabidopsis thaliana, offering greater relevance to monocot crops.Additionally, advances in metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, population genomics and pangenomics are expanding our understanding of the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying Sorghum's drought resilience. Despite these advantages, challenges remain in transformation efficiency and the availability of genomic tools. This review highlights Sorghum's drought tolerance mechanisms, available omics and genetic tools, described drought-related genes and regulatory networks, and the limitations and progress in gene manipulation for climate-resilient crop development. Sorghum uniquely combines the advantages of a staple crop and a model organism, making it a powerful next-generation system for climate-resilient agriculture.
Keywords: Sorghum, Model, drought, omics, transformation
Received: 14 Jul 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fontanet-Manzaneque, Hernández, Giordano and Caño-Delgado. 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:
Juan B. Fontanet-Manzaneque, Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
Ana I. Caño-Delgado, Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.