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John F. Doebley is an American plant geneticist whose main area of interest is how genes drive plant development and evolution.He has spent the last two decades examining the genetic differences and similarities between teosinte and maize and has cloned the major genes that cause the visible differences between these two very different plants.
Edward S. Buckler is a plant geneticist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service and holds an adjunct appointment at Cornell University. His work focuses on both quantitative and statistical genetics in maize as well as other crops such as cassava.
Gaut's early work provided several fundamental ideas about the genetic effects of domestication on crop plants; with postdoctoral scholar Adam Eyre-Walker, he used coalescent theory-based models to establish the occurrence of genetic bottlenecks during the domestication of maize, [7] a phenomenon which is now thought to influence the diversity ...
In the late 1930s, Paul Mangelsdorf suggested that domesticated maize was the result of a hybridization event between an unknown wild maize and a species of Tripsacum, a related genus; this has been refuted by modern genetic testing.
Plant breeding started with sedentary agriculture, particularly the domestication of the first agricultural plants, a practice which is estimated to date back 9,000 to 11,000 years. Initially, early human farmers selected food plants with particular desirable characteristics and used these as a seed source for subsequent generations, resulting ...
Genetic material from CWRs has been utilized by humans for thousands of years to improve the quality and yield of crops. Farmers have used traditional breeding methods for millennia, wild maize ( Zea mexicana ) is routinely grown alongside maize to promote natural crossing and improve yields.
Teosintes are critical components of maize domestication, but opinions vary about which taxa were involved. According to the most widely held evolutionary model, the crop was derived directly from Z. m. parviglumis by selection of key mutations; [6] but in some varieties up to 20% of its genetic material came from Z. m. mexicana through ...
Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, is the site of early domestication of several food crops, including teosinte (an ancestor of maize), [1] squash from the genus Cucurbita, bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria), and beans.