Sustainable biofuel sources require the new sources of biofuel crops that can be developed into scalable plantation to meet the growing energy demands. Diverse supply sources of bioenergy plantations (edible, nonedible, and perennial grasses) will enable de-risking impact on geography and climate change that humans are likely to face in future. Use of phenotypic descriptors alone does not provide a deep insight into plantation population dynamics and molecular diversity of a biofuel crop. We provide protocols and methods to rapidly assess population parameters for emerging biofuel crops using genomics. This article has an application focus on next-generation sequencing to assess biofuel crop diversity. Use of these methods can accelerate germplasm assessment to accelerate population development and creation of sustainable biofuel plantations.
Keywords: Biofuel crop; Climate change impact; Molecular diversity; Next-generation sequencing; Population diversity; Soil microbiome.