The Saccharinae clade of the Poaceae (grass) family of flowering plants includes several important crops with a rich history of contributions to humanity and the promise of still-greater contributions, as a result of some of the highest biomass productivity levels known, resilience to drought and other environmental challenges that are likely to increase, amenability to production systems that may mitigate or even reverse losses of ecological capital such as topsoil erosion, and the recent blossoming of sorghum as a botanical and genomic model for the clade.

In Genomics of the...