Breeding of Sugarcane

Abstract

Sugarcane is the main source for sugar production and the most important crop for energy production, as well as for byproducts like ethanol and fibers in the world. With a complex genome, the plant has its species from crosses between species of the genus Saccharum, which were the basis for sugarcane breeding programs worldwide. The production of sugarcane has increased worldwide due to breeding programs that have developed more productive clones for specific uses and adapted to different climatic conditions. The future objective of breeding programs is to develop sugarcane with high productivity, high sucrose content, drought tolerance, and high production of ethanol and biomass, i.e., plants with high fiber content and with cell walls easily broken to favor the production of ethanol from bagasse, efficient plants with low nitrogen fertilizer use, and others, and consequently to reduce environmental impacts. Currently, the demand for products derived from sugarcane is consistently increasing; the ethanol byproduct has been pointed out as one of the important sources to feed the demand for renewable energy in fossil and nonrenewable fuel substitution programs in different countries around the world. This chapter describes the genetic improvement of sugarcane and its current goals.

Molecular diversity and genetic structure of Saccharum complex accessions

“…So, the high variability and genome complexity into BPSG contributed to the large number of polymorphic fragments for each TRAP marker. The genome complexity of the modern hybrids comprises variable number of chromosomes between 100 and 130 [10,12,15,61,62], variable ploidy levels and copies of the homo(eo)logous chromosomes [12,17,63,64], gene duplication [17,64] and also genome modifications as insertions and deletions [12,34].…”

“…The higher differentiation among A and BB groups suggest that there was extensive use of a small number of ancestors accessions, mainly representatives of S. officinarum and S. spontaneum, in the first interspecific crosses and also that a preferential gene complexes were fixed during breeding process to develop modern Brazilian sugarcane cultivars according to yield performance interests and environmental limitations. Furthermore, mainly in the BB group, the accessions shared a larger number of parents between them [62], which contribute to increase the divergence with the A group. On the other hand, the moderate genetic differentiation among A and FH groups and the low genetic differentiation (3%) detected among BB and FH groups suggest that FH accessions have few generations from the first breeding crossings and that may be part of the genealogy of BB accessions.…”

RB005014 - a sugarcane cultivar with high tillering and agroindustrial yield

“…Thereafter the sugarcane plantlets were individualized and planted at an experimental field in order to establish the first selection stage (T1). In this phase, each genotype, represented by a single clump, was mass-selected in the first ratoon crop for general morphological criteria like as higher Brix, resistance to the main diseases, absence of flowering, stalk number and reduced bagasse pith (Morais et al 2015).…”

Evaluation of productivity of sweet potato genotypes for first and second generation bioethanol production

“…The productivity of sugarcane can vary from 40 to 70 tons per hectare, depending on the country. Some specific varieties are able to reach 150 tons of sugarcane per hectare under experimental conditions (Morais et al, 2015). Considering a mean of 82 L of bioethanol per ton of processed sugarcane (Boddey et al, 2008), a maximum of 3279 to 12300 L ha -1 year -1 could be produced.…”