Fait vos jeux, but while there will be some winners, the odds are stacked against most plants doing well in the future.
Tag - domestication
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.
Fi Gennu
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...
Debarati Chakraborty
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...
Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World by Alice Roberts
List books can be good, but there’s a knack to them. Nick Lane’s Life Ascending works because the various features to life he lists come together to build a bigger story. The list is secondary to the story...
Morphology, phylogeny and adaptation
The study of plant evolution and development in a phylogenetic context has accelerated research advances in both areas over the last decade. The addition of a robust phylogeny for virtually all plant taxa based on DNA...
botanyone
DArT whole genome profiling and evolution of edible banana
Edible banana varieties underwent a series of bottlenecks during their evolution and domestication, resulting in a number of original genotypes that diversified clonally. Sardos et al. have genotyped more than 500...
