Through domestication, humans have substantially altered the morphology of Zea mays ssp. parviglumis (teosinte) into the currently recognizable maize. This system serves as a model for studying adaptation, genome evolution, and the genetics and evolution of complex traits. To examine how domestication has reshaped the transcriptome of maize seedlings, we used expression profiling of 18,242 gene...

This report seeks to extend and apply the conceptual framework about the domestication of information and communication technologies. The domestication framework understands the adoption of technologies as a feedback process that converts technology artifacts from cold, lifeless tools to comfortable and useful consumer goods. This framework has been successful in helping us understand the adopt...

We investigated DNA sequence variation in 72 candidate genes in maize landraces and the wild ancestor of maize, teosinte. The candidate genes were chosen because they exhibit very low sequence diversity among maize inbreds and have sequence homology to known regulatory genes. We observed signatures of selection in 17 candidate genes, indicating that they were potential targets of artificial sel...

Gene expression differences between divergent lineages caused by modification of cis regulatory elements are thought to be important in evolution. We assayed genome-wide cis and trans regulatory differences between maize and its wild progenitor, teosinte, using deep RNA sequencing in F1 hybrid and parent inbred lines for three tissue types (ear, leaf and stem). Pervasive regulatory variation wa...

Over the last 10,000 years, crop domestication has been the single most important human cultural development. Grasses are prominent among these crops, and provide the vast majority of the world’s food. Similar traits have been selected during the domestication and breeding of these critically important grasses, and since they share a similar complement of genes, the same set of genes may have b...

This paper is a response, both to Fuller et al.’s recent criticism of Chinese research on rice domestication, as lacking evidence, and to their argument for the beginning of rice domestication around 4000 BC in the lower Yangzi River. We first survey previous publications that discuss the process from wild rice collection to rice domestication in China, and then examine early rice remains from ...

Domestication is the process by which plants or animals evolved to fit a human-managed environment, and it is marked by innovations in plant morphology and anatomy that are in turn correlated with new human behaviours and technologies for harvesting, storage and field preparation. Archaeobotanical evidence has revealed that domestication was a protracted process taking thousands of plant genera...

Rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the most important cereal grains in the world today and serves as a staple food source for more than half of the world's population. Research into when, where, and how rice was brought into cultivation and eventually domesticated, along with its development into a staple food source, is thus essential. These questions have been a point of nearly continuous research...