Date of Award

January 2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Agronomy

First Advisor

Clifford Weil

Second Advisor

Mitchell Tuinstra

Committee Member 1

Bruce Hamaker

Abstract

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor [L.] Moench) is the world’s fifth most important cereal crop and a dietary staple for approximately 500 million people in over 30 countries of the Semi-Arid Tropics. Unlike other major cereals such as maize, sorghum becomes much less digestible after it is cooked in the presence of water, often providing as little as 20% of the available protein to the consumer. Digestibility appears to be under genetic control, although the specific details remain unclear. The goals of these studies were to identify sorghum cultivars that do not show this large decrease in digestibility after cooking and to determine the genetic controls of increased digestibility in a previously identified sorghum mutant, P721Q.

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