Whole genome sequence data on Ethiopian key sorghum landraces and founder lines

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is the fifth most important cereal globally. Its genetic diversity is key to improving yield stability, stress tolerance, and adaptation to different environments. Ethiopia is one of the centers for the crop's origin, diversity, and use in both human food and livestock feed. However, genomic data on Ethiopian sorghum remain limited, especially for landraces preferred by local farmers. This dataset consists of whole-genome sequencing data for 188 Ethiopian sorghum accessions, including founder lines and important landraces from major agroecological zones. Sequencing was performed using the Complete Genomics DNBSEQ-T7 platform, generating high-coverage whole-genome data (20 × coverage). On average, each accession produced 64.7 million reads. Reads were aligned to the Sorghum bicolor NCBIv3 reference genome and variants called using GATK HaplotypeCaller with joint genotyping (GATK v4.6.1.0). Hard-filtering followed GATK best-practice thresholds (QD <2.0, FS> 60.0, MQ <40.0, MQRankSum <-12.5, ReadPosRankSum <-8.0), retaining biallelic SNPs with mean depth 10-50×, missingness ≤20%, and MAF ≥0.05, yielding 6095,752 high-confidence SNPs across 185 accessions. Both the raw FASTQ files and processed VCF files are publicly available to support studies of sorghum genetic diversity, population structure, selection, and the genetic basis of important traits.