Image Legend: Aerial photo of the switchgrass diversity panel late in the 2020 season at the Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan. (Robert Goodwin)
Published in Nature on January 27, 2021, a team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and DOE Joint Genome Institute has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome. Building off this work, researchers at all four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers—including JBEI—have expanded the network of common gardens and are exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing techniques to customize the crop for additional end products. Read more here on the JGI website.