Unravelling the Potential of Sweet Sorghum for Sugar Production in Kenya
Abstract
203 words
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench is an important food
and increasingly industrial crop and serves as a source for starch
and sugars for biofuel production world wide and especially in
sub-Saharan Africa. Sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.)
Moench) is one of many types of cultivated sorghum, noted for
its high sugar content in the stem juice. Even though the
technologies to process sugar products from sweet-sorghum
exits, the constraints for its large-scale cultivation are the limited
availability of genotypes suited to different agro-climatic
conditions in sub-Sahara Africa. Kenya the leading producer
and consumer of sugar in Eastern and Central Africa currently
only depends on sugarcane for sugar. The purpose of this study
is to characterise sweet sorghum introductions from regional
as well as international sources to support a breeding
programme that will provide Kenyan and African farmers with
high yielding sweet sorghum germplasm. The study will use a
combination of molecular tools such as single sequence repeat
(SSR) markers and amplified fragment length polymorphism
(AFLP) markers, quantitative trait loci (QTL) identification as
well as phenotypic profiling of sweet sorghum lines for sucrose.
Outputs from the study will include germplasm that could
directly be used for sucrose production and breeding lines for
further improvement.
Subjects
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