Natural allelic variance in the germplasm of highly polyploidy sugarcane

Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) as important sugar and biofuel crop are highly polypoid with complex genomes. A large amount of natural phenotypic variation exists in sugarcane germplasm. Understanding its allelic variance is a critical foundation for discovery of the genomic sequence variations and dissecting alleles and allele variant recombination controlling species adaptation and important agronomical traits. To characterize natural allelic variance in the “Saccharum complex”, a target enrichment approach followed by deep sequencing was applied on 12 representative germplasm accessions.