Affiliations: 1) Genetics Program, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC; 2) Department of Functional Genomics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC; 3) Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC; 4) Department of Molecular and Structural Biochemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Keywords: Complex traits
Some sorghum and maize populations are adapted to low phosphorus soils. Traditional farmers grow landraces of both in nutrient scarce soils with little to no supplemental phosphorus. In order to discover genetic determinants of local adaptation to low phosphorus soils we made environmental associations between phosphorus availability and the genomes of corn and sorghum. We used georeferenced genotyped datasets of landraces grown around their area of domestication, Latin America for maize, and Africa for sorghum. With the landrace geographical location, we extracted phosphorus availability and soil classification data. We investigated whether phosphorus associated genes were shared orthologs or differed between the two grasses, indicating different ways of adaptation to phosphorus scarcity.