Candidate genes and GO enrichment analysis
The genes located in the confidence intervals of the discovered QTL were considered candidate genes. All candidate genes were compared with the rice (v7) and Arabidopsis annotation databases (TAIR 10), and annotated with Gene Ontology (GO). The annotation file for switchgrass was accessed on JGI (Joint Genome Institute) Phytozome 13 website: https://njp-spin.jgi.doe.gov/. The GO enrichment analysis was tested using fisher’s exact test for each GO term using R package ‘topGO’ (Alexa and Rahnenuhrer, 2019). The GOs with adjusted p values of less than 0.05 were considered as significant.