One of the challenges in studying grasses for bioenergy applications is that they typically have long lifecycles and complex genomes. Jeremy Schmutz, head of the DOE JGI Plant Program at the HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology, pointed out that foxtail millet has several advantages as a model. It’s a compact genome roughly half a billion bases in size, and large quantities of it can be grown in small spaces in just a few months.
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