Christopher Saski[11] and Hong Luo[12]‘*

Introduction

It is now widely accepted that we are in an era of unpredictable climate change as a result of accelerated global warming largely due to our ever — increasing use of the decreasing reserve of fossil fuels causing elevating emissions of detrimental greenhouse gases, a transition from nonrenewable carbon sources to renewable bioresources for energy generation is of great importance to address the concerns about energy challenges in relation to global climate change. The use of non-food energy crops as renewable fuels on a global scale has many advantages beneficial to current ecological and economic issues. The C4 perennial species, switchgrass (Panicum virgatum, L. Poaceae) has been identified as an herbaceous biomass fuel crop (Vogel 1996, 2004). Primarily planted for land conservation, and utilized for forage and hay (Moser and Vogel 1995), switchgrass produces 540% more renewable than consumed nonrenewable energy with its cellulosic ethanol emitting 94% less greenhouse gas than gasoline, serving as an excellent biofuel feedstock (Schmer et al. 2008). Trait modifications using conventional and molecular breeding as well as transgenic approaches

will significantly enhance the great capacity of switchgrass plants for more cost-effective bioenergy production. The development of genomics tools in this important bioenergy crop is the key to help facilitate and accelerate genetic improvement of switchgrass for enhanced biomass production and more efficient bioconversion. This chapter summarizes recent advances in switchgrass genomics research focusing on structural genomic resources development and their important applications. We also discuss the significance and prospects of developing functional genomics, proteomics and metabolomics tools as well as genome sequencing initiatives in switchgrass.