Developing a New Crop and Its Science, From the Wild to Commerce: the Case of Miscanthus for Bioenergy.

Knowledge coming from crop breeding, genetics and agronomy from past decades makes the breeding of new varieties from wild germplasm a different proposition from the position of only a decade or so ago. The high biomass form of miscanthus in the US, suitable as an economically useful bioenergy feedstock, Miscanthus giganteus, is a sterile interspecies hybrid that is propagated vegetatively from rhizomes. One genotype that is vegetatively propagated is insufficient to meet potential needs for industrial uses and so an innovative breeding program was necessary to create and select new forms to satisfy potential commercial needs. This lecture will describe the innovations introduced to take wild accessions of miscanthus and produce commercially relevant, novel hybrids fit for purpose, based on underpinning genetic knowledge, including the making of dense molecular marker maps and QTL mapping.