Recent Research Progress in Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica)

Foxtail millet, as a significant food and fodder cereal crop, was widely cultivated in the Yellow River Valley and is still a kind of farming tradition of millet in Northern China. With the development of agriculture and the improvement of people's living standards, foxtail millet's planting area has become less and less in arid and semi-arid region now. However, because of its small diploid genome and self-pollination, foxtail millet is very suitable for whole genome sequence and is used as an experimental model plant for C4 photosynthesis and biofuel research. To systematically understand the recent research progress in foxtail millet; the authors summarize the following aspects in this study: germplasm, traditional breeding, physiology and biochemistry, molecular marker, construction of genetic linkage map, gene localization, genome sequencing and comparative genome. This may be a door to open for the further development of foxtail millet in the future.