pan-genome of cultivated and wild sorghum

Sorghum is a drought tolerant staple crop for half a billion people in Africa and Asia, an important source of animal feed throughout the world and a biofuel feedstock of growing importance. Cultivated sorghum and its inter-fertile wild relatives constitute the primary gene pool for sorghum. Understanding and characterising the diversity in the primary gene-pool is fundamental for its effective utilisation in crop improvement activities. Here, we report the first sorghum pan-genome comprising cultivated sorghums and its wild relatives to explore the diversity within the sorghum primary gene pool. With 13 genomes de novo assembled using a combination of short-read and long-read sequencing, we have generated a pan-genome of 51,349 gene families (35% of which are core genes), and identified 185.29 Mb sequence absent from the reference genome.