Danforth Plant Science Center to Lead Multi-Disciplinary Research to Enhance Stress Resilience in Bioenergy Sorghum

by Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (Newswise) Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., Principal Investigator and member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will lead a multi-institutional project to deepen the understanding of sorghum, a versatile bioenergy crop, and its response to environmental challenges. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program supports the three-year $2.5 million project for Genomics-Enabled Understanding and Advancing Knowledge on Plant Gene Function.

Tailoring crop productivity to variable growing environments, including resilience to and recovery from weather episodes such as flash droughts, is critical to expanding production ranges. This is particularly important for bioenergy crops to ensure they do not compete with food supplies while enhancing agronomic resilience and sustainability. Sorghum is a cereal crop with natural resilience to drought and heat stresses and is therefore an attractive system for developing crop production on resource-limited land. Eveland’s project explores the natural variation and gene networks underlying sorghum’s remarkable stress resilience and seeks to define the functions of critical genes and how they are regulated.

“There is extraordinary genetic diversity underlying sorghum’s adaptation to a wide range of environments, and we want to tap into this in a precise way to inform engineering and breeding strategies for future climates,” said Eveland. “A deep knowledge of the genes and molecular pathways that contribute to abiotic stress resilience is critical for developing crops that thrive in stressful or dynamic environments - a major challenge is identifying those that are most relevant in real field scenarios and how they function directly in the crop system.”

Eveland and collaborators will leverage the incredible genetic and phenotypic diversity found in sorghum to examine how responses at the molecular level, such as gene expression, lead to whole-plant morphological and physiological changes in response to environmental challenges. High-resolution, sensor-based phenotyping will be conducted on a variety of diverse sorghum lines throughout their entire growth cycle in various field environments. Since the genomes of all these lines have been sequenced, advanced genomics and gene editing methodologies will be integrated to help guide predictions of gene function in sorghum, ultimately linking genotype to phenotype.

Joining Eveland as collaborators on this project are Duke Pauli, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Plant Sciences and Giovanni Melandri, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Plant Sciences from the University of Arizona, and Vasit Sagan, Ph.D., professor of geospatial science and computer science, Associate Vice President for Geospatial Sciences, and director of the Remote Sensing Lab at Saint Louis University. Together, this cross-institutional team brings complementary expertise in plant genetics and genomics, stress physiology, transformation and gene editing, remote sensing and phenotyping, and GeoAI.

A unique aspect of the project is access to state-of-the-art, multi-scale remote sensing capabilities and GeoAI phenotyping tools at two contrasting field sites: a highly productive mid-western environment in St. Charles, MO, and a hot, arid environment in Maricopa, AZ. The Danforth Center Field Research Site was established in 2022 and serves as a fundamental testing ground where scientists can evaluate and refine their research for real-world application. It occupies a unique position, bridging applied and basic plant science with environmental and management realities. The University of Arizona's Maricopa Agricultural Center provides an exceptional capability for managed drought stress trials through controlled irrigation. Here, a 30-ton robotic field-based phenotyping infrastructure collects high-resolution sensor data for crop traits throughout the growing season.

“Unlocking sorghum’s natural resilience requires seeing the plant in its full environmental context, and that’s where advanced field phenotyping, like what we have at the University of Arizona, truly transforms our understanding of plant growth and development,” said Pauli. “By combining high-resolution sensing with genomics across contrasting environments, we can uncover the traits and molecular responses that actually matter for crop performance under real-world stress. This project allows us to translate complex plant–environment interactions into actionable insights for engineering and breeding sorghum ideotypes capable of thriving in the harsher climates ahead.”

Advanced phenotyping data analytics pipelines have been developed as part of other DOE-funded initiatives through Pauli’s team at the University of Arizona and Sagan’s team in the Remote Sensing Lab at Saint Louis University. These tools will be used to extract information on physical traits, including multi-dimensional attributes and those not immediately visible to the naked eye, such as light reflectance, which can be used in predictive models for crop productivity in contrasting field scenarios.

“By combining remote sensing technologies with advanced GeoAI, we can automate the entire phenotyping pipeline—from data collection and calibration to large-scale analysis across hundreds of sorghum genotypes,” said Sagan. “Field robots, drones, and satellites give us a multi-scale view of how plants grow and respond to changes in the environment. This level of insight is essential to help identify genetic markers that contribute to a plant’s response to environmental extremes and ultimately enhance sustainable bioenergy.”

The project will also leverage an automated system for quantifying a panel of oxidative stress compounds, established in Melandri’s lab at the University of Arizona, to survey biochemical responses to the environment in the diverse sorghum lines. Cellular biochemistry continuously responds to environmental fluctuations and stress, and so these compounds will serve as biomarkers for plant stress status. By linking these biomarkers to remote sensing signatures in different field environments, it may ultimately be possible to predict crop yield through remote monitoring of stress status.

“The integration between field phenotyping and biochemical analysis will allow us to link sorghum cellular antioxidant responses in different environments to crop performance and remote sensing signatures,” said Melandri. “The diversity panel of bioenergy sorghum lines used in the project will also enable us to identify the genetic control of antioxidant biochemical markers (biomarkers) for performance stability under stress, facilitating their incorporation into breeding programs aimed at further enhancing the climatic resilience of this crop.”

Founded in 1998, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a nonprofit research institute with a mission to improve the human condition through plant science. The Center’s research, education and outreach efforts focus on food security and environmental sustainability, positioning the St. Louis region as a global leader in plant science. The Center is supported by funding from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, The Gates Foundation and the generosity of individuals, corporation and foundation donors. For more information, visit danforthcenter.org. READ MORE