Commercial sugarcane, Saccharum spp. hybrids, arose from interspecific crossing in the late 1890s and the resultant complex polyploid genome has challenged conventional breeding approaches. The grower- and miller-funded South African Sugarcane Research Institute (SASRI) has a 100-yr history which began by breeding for local agroclimatic regions. Biotechnology for cultivar improvement was introduced in the early 1990s. Collabor...