Researchers in Brazil found a special part of tomato genome that controls the size of not just the fruit but also the leaves and stems. This discovery could help making tomato crops more resilient to different...
Tag - domestication
Renata Cantoro
Phylogenetics Reveals the Importance of Biodiversity to Food Plants in Mexico
Tracing the phylogenetic patterns in native edible plants of Mexico shows how indigenous cultures have sustainably utilized regional botanical diversity for millennia.
Fi Gennu
A.I. Assistant
Can unexpected changes happen in the process of plant domestication?
This fascinating investigation takes us on a journey through the evolutionary history of the squash plants to understand how domestication has modified the characteristics of these plants and their relationships with...
Ingrid N. Gomes
More plants will be ‘losers’ than ‘winners’ in the future, thanks to human activity
Fait vos jeux, but while there will be some winners, the odds are stacked against most plants doing well in the future.
Dale Maylea
Plants that have adapted to exploit human activity now depend on disturbance
Plants that have grown in partnership with human activity in meadows can be a great source of seeds for restoration projects, but their ability to germinate is also a problem.
Seminal roots help maize grab nutrients
When humans selected for bigger seeds in maize, they may have also unintentionally improved its root system.
Botanists find the molecular difference between edible pacaya and the wild palms
Pacaya palm (Chamaedorea tepejilote) is a plant eaten in Guatemala and Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras. It’s cultivated, but not intensively. Hanene Hosni and colleagues examined how the domesticated pacaya palm...
Lessons from Mediterranean olive domestication: keep wild relatives close by and do not “overselect”
New study in the journal BMC Biology found that Mediterranean olives have almost as high genetic diversity as olive cultivars
Juniper Kiss
Disentangling domestication and environmental effects on plant-herbivore interactions
How has domestication affected herbivory and anti-herbivore defenses of chaya, a plant crop grown for it's leaves in the Yucatan pensula?
William Salter
The scented story of rice
A guest post by Debarati Chakraborty The power of aroma compounds to offer physical, mental and spiritual delight is one of the oldest enchanting tales. Aroma stimulates the limbic system, one of the primitive parts of...
Wild relatives of beans retain useful drought resistance
A new study of wild crop relatives of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) finds they retain useful adaptations to drought stress.
Larger apples have lower natural defences against pests
Botanists find a clear trade-off between fruit size and phytochemical production, helping to explain why our modern varieties are highly susceptible to diseases and pests.
Alex Assiry
The poorly known Ethiopian crop Enset
Enset, a relative of the banana, provides the staple food for around 20 million Ethiopians, yet is barely known outside of the region.
Alun Salt
Seed characteristic variations and genetic structure of wild Zizania latifolia along a latitudinal gradient in China
Crop wild relatives are important genetic resources for crop improvement, but they can also be candidates for crop domestication. Zizania latifolia is a perennial aquatic grass which was domesticated as a vegetable crop...
