Sorghum is no fair-weather cereal. Able to thrive in hot, semidry places, it feeds more than 500 million people in 98 countries, primarily in the developing world. Sorghum is also an important U.S. biofuel. Now, the analysis of its genome sequence has revealed clues about how this crop toughs out subpar growing conditions. Drought tolerance may arise from extra copies of key genes, and sorghum's efficient photosynthetic pathway was gradually cobbled together from existing photosynthetic genes and duplicated genes that shifted their function over millions of years, says Andrew Paterson, a plant geneticist at the University of Georgia in Athens.
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Elizabeth Pennisi (2009) studied this question.