Evaluation location: Texas, United States
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the United States of Department of Agriculture (USDA) announces the release of 252 sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) mutant lines with available DNA sequence
https://www.sorghumbase.org/relnotes. The 252 sorghum mutants were generated using single seed descent, beginning from the wildtype seeds of the inbred line BTx623 (M0) treated with ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS) and concluding at the M3 generation. The M4 seeds were pooled from 10 panicles harvested from the M3 plants and deposited into the mutant library. A core set of 252 lines were selected for whole genome sequencing partly based on specific phenotypes and partly by random selection. This endeavor resulted in detection and cataloguing of more than 1.8 million canonical EMS-induced mutations (or variants). The variants altered the sorghum genome uniformly and bioinformatic analyses indicated that approximately 35,000 genes were affected by large consequential mutations (Jiao et al. 2016).