IN A FEW SHORT years, sorghum farmers might be inundated with new hybrids from which to choose thanks to the discovery of two sorghum haploid inducer lines. Through a collaborative research project with the United Sorghum Checkoff Program, research- ers at DuPont Pioneer searched tirelessly for three years, looking for a needle in a haystack… and they found two. Cleve Franks and Tanveer Hussain essentially screened all the germplasm they had access to — well over 4,000 hybrids — from all over the world. “We took a brute force approach and got lucky,” says Franks, a DuPont Pioneer plant breeder. However, he says as a researcher you can’t get too excited early in the process. “We found a lot of things that could have been inducers, but we weren’t sure yet,” Franks explains. “It never was really real until we grew it the second time and could confirm that those were in fact haploid plants, and it kept happening and kept happening. So we knew we had the real thing at that point.” What’s the real thing? Two sorghum haploid inducers, which could ultimately lead to the pro- duction of doubled haploids in sorghum. “From a breeding perspective, this could be a game-changing discovery — quite revolutionary in terms of the way we go about product develop- ment in sorghum,” Franks says. “This could give sorghum breeders the opportunity to create fin- ished products (finished parental lines) to go into producing hybrids in one single step.” For the most part, sorghum breeders have been limited to traditional plant breeding methods. Franks says it currently takes five years to completely finish an inbred line where he feels comfortable using it in a hybrid combination. With doubled haploid breed- ing, he says, he can do that in one year. “It’s a significant change in the way we do research,” he adds. The project got its start during a board meeting of the United Sorghum Checkoff Program. “Our board of directors realized that to effec- tively meet the needs of growers, it would require It’s what sorghum farmers need, and researchers are delivering. Julie Deering jdeering@issuesink.com Something Revolutionary something revolutionary within sorghum genet- ics and sorghum breeding programs,” says Justin Weinheimer, crop improvement director for the United Sorghum Checkoff Program. “Farmers have benefitted from this technology in other commodi- ties, particularly corn. We are excited to unlock the same potential for sorghum.” HAPLOID DIPLOID As an example, Pioneer reports that in 2012, the company generated more corn inbred lines through doubled haploid technology than it had produced in the first 80 years of its breeding program. “Think about a sorghum breeding program and only being able to focus on two or three characteris- tics at a time; now we can work on many,” Franks says. “It’s like exponentially expanding your bandwidth. “It will allow us to make genetic gains in a much more efficient way, significantly reducing the amount of backcrossing required. We’re talking about going from eight or nine generations to two.” Franks says it allows breeders to leverage other technologies, such as molecular markers and genomic predictions — “things like that we couldn’t do as well with traditional breeding methods.” All in all, this means sorghum will be able to better compete with other crops. Next Steps While the discovery of these two inducer lines is excit- ing, the researchers explain that it’s the first hurdle cleared in accelerating yield gains for sorghum. Next steps include fine-tuning it to increase the haploid induction rate and getting it into a produc- tion system. 38 / SEEDWORLD.COM DECEMBER 2017