Kaiwen Liang

Agri-Products Application Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resouces, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Biological Evidence, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 6   
Received: 30 Sep., 2025    Accepted: 05 Nov., 2025    Published: 20 Nov., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sorghum is a very important food and energy crop in the world, but it is often affected by many diseases, such as anthracnose, grain mold, bacterial stripe disease, and pests like aphids. These problems will cause the yield of sorghum to decline and also affect its quality. In recent years, molecular biology and multi-omics techniques have developed rapidly, which has also helped us more clearly understand the disease resistance mechanism of sorghum. Current research indicates that sorghum defuses pathogens in multiple layers. It can first identify the signals related to pathogens and then transmit these signals, such as through MAPK or some hormone routes. Then, many disease-resistant genes will be activated in sorghum, including some NLR receptors, PR proteins, antimicrobial peptides, and 3-deoxyanthocyanins, etc. Meanwhile, the metabolic process of sorghum will also be rearranged, thereby enhancing its broad-spectrum resistance to fungi, bacteria and insects. The integration of multi-omics data (such as genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) offers us a more comprehensive picture, which includes many complex regulatory networks, such as disease-resistant genes, signaling pathways, and various metabolites. Genome editing technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, as well as molecular marker-assisted selection, also make disease-resistant breeding more precise and efficient. The utilization of the microbiome to help sorghum defend against diseases or the application of some biological control methods is also regarded as very promising. Future research needs to integrate multi-omics and systems biology to conduct a more in-depth study on how sorghum defuses against the simultaneous infection of multiple pathogens. At the same time, it is also necessary to better integrate molecular breeding with traditional breeding to enhance the efficiency of selecting disease-resistant varieties and achieve more stable and sustainable disease management.

Sorghum; Molecular defense mechanism; Disease-resistant breeding; Multi-omics; Pathogen interaction