Shared genetic control of root system architecture between Zea mays and Sorghum bicolor

Determining the genetic control of root system architecture (RSA) in plants via large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) requires high-throughput pipelines for root phenotyping. We developed CREAMD (Core Root Excavation using Compressed-air), a high-throughput pipeline for the cleaning of field-grown roots, and COFE (Core Root Feature Extraction), a semi-automated pipeline for the extraction of RSA traits from images. CREAMD-COFE was applied to diversity panels of maize (Zea mays) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), which consisted of 369 and 294 genotypes, respectively. Six RSA-traits were extracted from images collected from \u3e3,300 maize roots and \u3e1,470 sorghum roots. SNP-based GWAS identified 87 TAS (trait-associated SNPs) in maize, representing 77 genes and 115 TAS in sorghum. An additional 62 RSA-associated maize genes were identified via eRD-GWAS. Among the 139 maize RSA-associated genes (or their homologs), 22 (16%) are known to affect RSA in maize or other species. In addition, 26 RSA-associated genes are co-regulated with genes previously shown to affect RSA and 51 (37% of RSA-associated genes) are themselves trans-eQTL for another RSA-associated gene. Finally, the finding that RSA-associated genes from maize and sorghum included seven pairs of syntenic genes demonstrates the conservation of regulation of morphology across taxa