Background of the Sesame Genome Project

With the development of sesame industry in the world, the requirement for increasing the breeding efficiency and realizing various breeding objectives with the aid of modern molecular breeding techniques has become more and more urgent. In order to realize molecular breeding and concisely aggregate the elite genes into new varieties in sesame, deciphering a great amount of genes or molecular markers and elucidating the sesame genome characters are the key issues. Based on the above requisites, Henan Sesame Research Center, Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China organized the Sesame Genome Working Group (SGWG) in 2009 and initiated the Sesame Genome Project (SGP) in 2010. The organizational background of SGWG and the targets of the SGP are also introduced in this chapter.