Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) is one of the world’s most efficient crops in converting solar energy into chemical energy, which makes it the leading sugar crop and a primary energy crop.

Sugarcane belongs to the Saccharum genus, which encompasses only polyploid species, and is part of the Poaceae family (Grasses), like rice, and the Andropogoneae tribe, like maize and sorghum.

Modern cultivars were produced about a century ago through hybridization between the domesticated sugar producing species  Saccharum officinarum and the wild species Saccharum spontaneum.


The sugarcane genome

Sugarcane presents one of the most complex crop genome studied to date, mainly due to a very high degree of polyploidy, aneuploidy (2n=ca 12x=ca 120), together with an interspecific origin. Modern cultivars have around 120 chromosomes with 70-80% originated from S. officinarum and 10-20% from S. spontaneum and a few chromosomes derived from interspecific intrachromosomal recombinations.


Links between SouthGreen and Sugarcane

The South Green Bioinformatics platform supported theses analyses. The platform centralizes sugarcane data such as genetic maps and markers informations (TropGeneDB), BAC sequences and annotations (GNPannot), ….

The annotation are made using GNPannot.

Sorghum genome shows important synteny conservation and colinearity with sugarcane. Since a reference genome sequence is not yet available for sugarcane, the sorghum whole genome sequence is thus used as reference for sugarcane.

All the sequence data are thus localized on the sorghum sequence using a sorghum genome browser.