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Updated: Jan 22, 2026

Measuring Stolons and Rhizomes of Turfgrasses Using a Digital Image Analysis System
Published on: February 19, 2019
Transcriptome assembly and annotation of johnsongrass (Sorghum halepense) rhizomes identify candidate
Nathan Ryder1, Kevin M Dorn2, Mark Huitsing1
1Departments of Biology and Statistics Dordt College Sioux Center Iowa.
Abstract:
Rhizomes facilitate the wintering and vegetative propagation of many perennial grasses. Sorghum halepense (johnsongrass) is an aggressive perennial grass that relies on a robust rhizome system to persist through winters and reproduce asexually from its rootstock nodes. This study aimed to sequence and assemble expressed transcripts within the johnsongrass rhizome. A de novo transcriptome assembly was generated from a single johnsongrass rhizome meristem tissue sample. A total of 141,176 probable protein-coding sequences from the assembly were identified and assigned gene ontology terms using Blast2GO. Estimated expression analysis and BLAST results were used to reduce the assembly to 64,447 high-confidence sequences. The johnsongrass assembly was compared to Sorghum bicolor, a related nonrhizomatous species, along with an assembly of similar rhizome tissue from the perennial grain crop Thinopyrum intermedium. The presence/absence analysis yielded a set of 98 expressed johnsongrass contigs that are likely associated with rhizome development.
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