August 28, 2007

American university commits US$1 million to for sorghum research

A $1 million grant has been committed by the Kansas State University (KSU) through its Targeted Excellence programme to promote sorghum research as well as developing the grain's superior varieties.

The funds will support a four-year research project to study sorghum characteristics, according to Frank White, a professor of plant pathology with KSU Research and Extension and the project leader.

The research -- called the Sorghum Transnational Genomics Programme -- aims to identify genes for use in sorghum improvement and disease tolerance as well as an alternative fuel production and for human nutrition, White said. The project will work in concert with KSU's Centre for Sorghum Improvement, which was established in 2003 and the Great Plains Sorghum Improvement and Utilization Centre, created in 2006.

White will work with an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including Clare Nelson, an associate professor also in plant pathology, Mitch Tuinstra and Jianming Yu, respectively professor and assistant professor in agronomy and Chris Little, an assistant professor in plant pathology. Other researchers at KSU, as well as scientists at Cornell, Texas A&M and the US Department of Agriculture, will be involved in the project.

Kansas is the top grain sorghum producer in the nation, accounting for nearly half of the annual US crop. The US is the world largest producer of grain sorghum with about 300 million bushels per year. In 2006, sales of grain sorghum totalled US$487 million into the Kansas economy, figures from the Kansas Sorghum Producers Association show. The latest projections by the Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service indicate that Kansas growers are on track to produce 192.4 million bushels of grain sorghum this year.