Monday, January 6th, 2014
In the December 2013 volume of Nature Reviews Genetics, CGSB post-doctoral fellow, Rachel Meyer, and Michael Purugganan co-wrote a review article on the state of the field of crop domestication genetics and genomics. Patterns of mutation revealed through whole genome resequencing, quantitative trait locus, and candidate gene studies were evaluated in concert with the known changes in crop traits traced from historical and archaeobotanical records. Knock-out mutational lesions, particularly to regulatory genes, are the most common crop mutations, but increasingly broad sampling has revealed that the same gene was often altered by multiple mutations driven by parallel selection occurring in different communities. To read the full article “Evolution of crop species”, click here.
