Mulberry (Morus spp.), being an economically important tree, is cultivated in China, India, Thailand, Brazil, Uzbekistan and other Countries across the globe, for its leaves to feed monophagous mulberry silkworm (Bombyx mori). The sustainability of silk industry is directly correlated with the production and continuous supply of high-quality mulberry leaves. In India, it is cultivated on large ...

The Eastern Himalayan region of Northeast (NE) India is home to a large number of indigenous rice varieties, which may serve as a valuable genetic resource for future crop improvement to meet the ever-increasing demand for food production. However, these varieties are rapidly being lost due to changes in land-use and agricultural practices, which favor agronomically improved varieties. A detail...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS In spite of the abundance of archaeological, bio-archaeological, historical and genetic data, the origins, historical biogeography, identity of ancient grapevine cultivars and mechanisms of domestication are still largely unknown. Here, analysis of variation in seed morphology aims to provide accurate criteria for the discrimination between wild grapes and modern cultivars a...

Hybrid sterility is a major form of postzygotic reproductive isolation. Although reproductive isolation has been a key issue in evolutionary biology for many decades in a wide range of organisms, only very recently a few genes for reproductive isolation were identified. The Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) is divided into two subspecies, indica and japonica. Hybrids between indica and ja...

The genome of sugarcane is one of the most complex among living organisms. It is characterized by a high level of polyploidy with current cultivated varieties being derived from interspecific hybridization between S. officinarum, a domesticated species and S. spontaneum, a wild relative. Various ploidy level – from 5x to 14x – have been reported for S. spontaneum. Cultivated varieties are often...

A collection of 157 Triticum aestivum accessions, representative of wheat breeding in Italy during the 20(th) century, was assembled to describe the evolutionary trends of cultivated varieties throughout this period. The lines were cultivated in Italy, in two locations, over two growing seasons, and evaluated for several agronomical, morphological and qualitative traits. Analyses were conducted...

Buckwheat is a sixth staple food crop after rice, wheat, maize, fingermillet, and barley inNepal. It is considered as an alternate cereal and poor man’s crop, representing an important food supply in remote places of Himalayas. It is the best crop in higher altitude in terms of adaptation to different climatic variables and easily fitted to different cropping patterns due to short duration. It ...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is the world's most economically important potted plant, but despite its preeminence it is not clear which wild populations are ancestral to the varieties cultivated around the world. Tradition holds that the U.S. envoy to Mexico J. R. Poinsett collected the progenitors of the over 300 varieties in global cultivation on an 1828 excursi...

Tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, is divided into two widely distributed varieties: the cultivated S. lycopersicum var. lycopersicum, and the weedy S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme. Solanum pimpinellifolium is the most closely related wild species of tomato.The roles of S. pimpinellifolium and S. l. cerasiforme during the domestication of tomato are still under debate. Some authors consider S. l. c...

Flowers of cultivated buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) often receive natural pollen loads of fewer than 10 pollen grains. The cultivated varieties also have high genetic variability. These observations raise the question of whether seed production in buckwheat is often limited by pollen delivery, and whether small increases in pollen load could result in gametophytic selection through po...