Nutritional composition of commercial sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) genotypes evaluated over regrowth cycles in different environments in Brazil

Understanding genetic variation, genotype × environment interactions and associations between nutritional component traits is crucial for the development of improved sugarcane cultivars. Additionally, this information can be useful to identify a wide range of variation in these traits by taking into account different varietal profiles, production environments and years. Here, we report for the first time the evaluation of G × E interactions analyzed for characteristics associated with the “nutritional composition” of sugarcane, as well as the “technological composition”. This study involved the analysis of 20 nutritional composition characteristics evaluated in 20 commercial sugarcane varieties in six production environments analyzed across two agricultural years. The present study generated an unpublished database of 14,300 experimental data points on sugarcane nutritional composition that can be used in studies on the substantial equivalence for future genetically modified cultivars. The genetic heritability and genotypic correlation of sugarcane compositional characteristics were also estimated. For the traits reducing sugar of juice, lipids, ash and protein, the heritability value was zero because their genetic variances were also estimated as zero. Thus, all the phenotypic variation associated with these traits is due to non-heritable factors. For all traits, the difference between the minimum and maximum value of the adjusted means exceeded at least 50%. The observed results indicated that there was a strong influence of GxE interactions on the phenotypic variations of the characteristics associated with the nutritional and technological composition of sugarcane.