Maize (Zea mays L.) plays a very important role in human and animal nutrition in a number of developed and developing countries, worldwide. Breeding for improved protein quality in maize began in the mid-1960s with the discovery of mutants, such as opaque-2, that produce enhanced levels of lysine and tryptophan, the two amino acids deficient in maize endosperm proteins. However, adverse pleiotr...

Abstract—Selenium is an-antioxidant which is important for human health enters food chain through crops. In Kenya Zea mays is consumed by 96% of population hence is a cheap and convenient method to provide selenium to large number of population. Several soil factors are known to have antagonistic effects on selenium speciation hence the uptake by Zea mays. There are no studies in Kenya that has...

Ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences were used to evaluate the phylogenetics of Zea and Tripsacum. Maximum likelihood and polymorphism parsimony were used for phylogenetic reconstructions. Zea ITS nucleotide diversity was high compared to other plant species, but approximately equivalent to other maize loci. Coalescence of ITS alleles was rapid relative to other nuclear loci; h...

Although maize (Zea mays) retrotransposons are recombinationally inert, the highly polymorphic structure of maize haplotypes raises questions regarding the local effect of intergenic retrotransposons on recombination. To examine this effect, we compared recombination in the same genetic interval with and without a large retrotransposon cluster. We used three different bz1 locus haplotypes, McC,...

Adaptation of crops to climate change has motivated an increasing interest in the potential value of novel traits from wild species; maize wild relatives, the teosintes, harbor traits that may be useful to maize breeding. To study the ecogeographic distribution of teosinte we constructed a robust database of 2363 teosinte occurrences from published sources for the period 1842-2016. A geographic...

Maize (Zea mays L) is one of the most versatile emerging crops having wider adaptability under varied agro-climatic conditions. Globally, maize is known as queen of cereals because it has the highest genetic yield potential among the cereals. It is cultivated on nearly 150 m ha in about 160 countries having wider diversity of soil, climate, biodiversity and management practices that contributes...

A polypeptide serologically related to the tobacco pathogenesis-related-1 family of proteins has been purified from the root tissue of maize (Zea mays L.), and the complete amino acid sequence has been determined. The mature protein has a calculated molecular weight of 14,970 and isoelectric point of 4.2. The maize protein shows 66 to 68% amino acid identity with the tobacco pathogenesis-relate...