Tall 3-dwarfs: oxymoron or opportunity to increase grain yield in sorghum?

George-Jaeggli B, Lefèvre-Arbogast S, Hunt C, Cruickshank A, Jordan DR

Published: 23 April 2021 in Planta
Keywords: Breeding, Dwarfing genes, Plant height
Pubmed ID: 33885928
DOI: 10.1007/s00425-021-03629-w

Plant height was positively correlated with grain yield across a large set of 3-dwarf sorghum hybrids and production environments in north-eastern Australia. In industrialised countries, plant breeders tend to select for short plant stature in cereals like wheat, barley and rice, but also grain sorghum. This is mainly to prevent stalk lodging and to allow for machine harvesting. However, this counteracts an intrinsic positive relationship between plant height and yield potential often observed in cereals. We used data from multi-environment breeding trials comprising large sets of female sorghum lines from a range of pedigrees in hybrid combination with five different male testers. The hybrids were grown in 22 different rainfed environments in north-eastern Australia, which allowed us to thoroughly examine the relationship between plant height and yield across a range of productivity levels. Covariate analysis showed that in 38 out of the 90 tested relationships, grain yield was significantly (p