Journal of Energy Bioscience 2025, Vol.16, No.3, 151-162 http://bioscipublisher.com/index.php/jeb 159 complex traits such as biomass, cellulose content, and saccharification efficiency, but also makes it more difficult for maize to cope with environmental changes (such as climate warming and soil deterioration). Figure 2 Schematic depiction of the maize breeding pipeline of CIMMYT for developing and deploying elite multiple stress-tolerant tropical maize germplasm for sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Adopted from Prasanna et al., 2021) In order to solve this problem, we can make more use of wild species, local varieties and heterologous germplasm in the future, introduce new genes into maize breeding, and expand the gene pool. We can also use some multivariate statistical methods, such as principal component analysis and correlation analysis, to find out which varieties have better biofuel traits. 9.2 The role of multi-omics in trait mining It is difficult to fully understand the source of these complex traits by relying solely on traditional appearance selection or single gene markers. But now, we can use genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and phenomics to study the control mechanisms of maize biomass, cellulose, lignin and other related traits (Pratikshya et al., 2025). Technologies such as genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) and whole genome selection (GS) can help us find gene loci closely related to biofuel traits. As long as enough planting data in different locations and environments are accumulated, researchers can have a more comprehensive understanding of the performance of maize under various ecological conditions and its genetic mechanisms (Khan et al., 2025; Pratikshya et al., 2025). In the future, as sequencing technology becomes faster and cheaper, automated phenotyping technology becomes more and more advanced, and with the support of big data analysis, the integration of multi-omics will definitely play a greater role in trait discovery, functional verification and molecular design breeding, and will also make maize biofuel breeding more accurate and intelligent.
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