Preface

The biggest challenge facing agricultural scientists is to feed an ever-increasing human population, which is expected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050. The demand for cereals, for both food and animal feed uses, is projected to reach around 3 billion tons by 2050 from 2.1 billion tons today. This gap is to be filled in spite of decreasing availability of arable land, deteriorating soil fertility, and increased incidences of climatic extremes. Under that context, agriculturists need to make the agricultural practices more climate resilient. Sorghum is the fifth most important cereal crop after rice, wheat, maize, and barley, and is extensively grown in the semi-arid tropics of the world thanks to its inherent ability to tolerate harsh environments. Thus, this is a model crop among grass species to study stress response and ensuring food security for millions of poor masses living in the most impoverished drought-prone regions of the world. Sorghum not only provides food and feed but also serves as an important source of fodder for large cattle with its dry stover. Green plants are also a source of forage for cattle. In recent years, sweet sorghum has turned out to be a source of ethanol production and second-generation lignocellulose-based biofuels. Thus, sorghum has the potential to provide food, feed, fodder, and fuel. Unlike other cereals such as rice, wheat, and maize, sorghum received lesser attention with regard to genetic and genomics studies in the past. The lesser economic importance of sorghum is the principal reason behind this. However, over the last two and a half decades much progress has been made in this area. After publication of the rice genome sequence, sorghum turned out to be a natural complement to rice in understanding the complexity of the genomes of this most important group of crop plants, that is, the grass family. With its proximity not only to cereal crops but also to commercial crops including sugarcane, sorghum has turned out to be a model crop to initiate genomics research through syntenic studies. With publication of the sorghum genome sequence in 2009, the scenario was revolutionized and this neglected crop started receiving prominence in genomics studies. Stress tolerance of the crop proved to be an added advantage for its popularity. Over the period of a few decades many reports on sorghum genomics as well as transgenic research have come into the public domain, which deals with almost all traits related to the crop. These studies have exhibited promise to improve the crop further in terms of stress tolerance and yielding ability.