I examined agrobiodiversity in smallholder cultural landscapes with the goal of offering new insights into management and policy options for the resilience-based in situ conservation and social-ecological sustainability of local, food-producing crop types, i.e., landraces. I built a general, integrative approach to focus on both land use and livelihood functions of crop landraces in the context...

BACKGROUND Drought is one of the major constraints for plant productivity worldwide. Different mechanisms of drought-tolerance have been reported for several plant species including maize. However, the differences in global gene expression between drought-tolerant and susceptible genotypes and their relationship to physiological adaptations to drought are largely unknown. The study of the diffe...

BACKGROUND Climate change threatens maize productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security, access to locally adapted genetic resources and varieties is an important adaptation measure. Most of the maize grown in Africa is a genetic mix of varieties introduced at different historic times following the birth of the trans-Atlantic economy, and knowledge about geographic structure and l...

global warming and predictions of climatic changes additionally put breeding for drought tolerance in the focus of breeding programmes for maize. extensive studies on the existing gene bank collection of the maize research institute “zemun polje“ have been performed with the aim to identify and form initial sources for the development of maize inbreds more tolerant to drought. all accessions (a...

To investigate the genetic basis of maize adaptation to temperate climate, collections of 375 inbred lines and 275 landraces, representative of American and European diversity, were evaluated for flowering time under short- and long-day conditions. The inbred line collection was genotyped for 55 genomewide simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. Comparison of inbred line population structure with...

van Heerwaarden et al. (2011) provide evidence of approximately 20% introgression of mexicana to maize varieties growing at over 1500 m. Below this altitude, only 1% such introgression is observed. Given the phylogenetic proximity of mexicana to parviglumis, these altitudespecific differences in admixture are more than sufficient to explain the close affinity of highland maize to teosinte; i.e....

BACKGROUND Artificial selection results in phenotypic evolution. Maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) was domesticated from its wild progenitor teosinte (Zea mays subspecies parviglumis) through a single domestication event in southern Mexico between 6000 and 9000 years ago. This domestication event resulted in the original maize landrace varieties. The landraces provided the genetic material for mode...

Latin America is the center of domestication and diversity maize, second most cultivated crop worldwide. In this region, maize landraces are fundamental for food security, livelihoods, culture. Nevertheless, genetic erosion (i.e., loss variation in a crop) threatens continued cultivation situ conservation landrace that crucial to climate change adaptation diverse uses maize. We provide an overv...

The origin of maize (Zea mays mays) in the US Southwest remains contentious, with conflicting archaeological data supporting either coastal(1-4) or highland(5,6) routes of diffusion of maize into the United States. Furthermore, the genetics of adaptation to the new environmental and cultural context of the Southwest is largely uncharacterized(7). To address these issues, we compared nuclear DNA...

F or several years, there has been uncertainty about the presence of transgenes in maize landraces in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The first report of their presence in this region was that of Quist and Chapela (1, 2), who based their results on samples obtained in 2000; these findings were later called into doubt because of the methodology used. However, further studies by the Mexican governme...