ABSTRACT
Sugarcane is a tall tropical perennial grass with its center of origin located in Southeast Asia, where it has probably been cultivated since prehistoric times. The sugarcane industry must continually seek new approaches and adopt new technologies that might better guide research in cultivar development programs. Constraints dictated by polyploidy to construct genetic maps have been analyzed by Wu et al. Mapping strategies in sugarcane are based on pseudo-testcross approaches. When considering large and complex genomes such as sugarcane, the sequencing of complementary deoxyribonucleic acid to produce “Expressed Sequence Tags” is an alternative to reveal the expressed portion of a genome. Sugarcane has also turned into a target for the production of novel products such as proteins with pharmaceutical properties and as a producer of biopolymers. By-products obtained from sugarcane include a wide range of derivatives that can be used in the energy, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other industries.
