For far too long, the behaviour of our pets has been seen (at best) as unconstrained by comprehensible evolutionary processes, or (at worst) entirely constructed by anthropomorphism. John Bradshaw’s Cat Sense is a welcome attempt to challenge this status quo by demonstrating that science can help us understand why domestic cats do what they do, and how they inveigled their way into our homes. C...

Considerable insights were recently gained into the history and process of rice domestication. It becomes increasingly clear that artificial and natural selections coupled with extensive introgression have shaped the genomes of cultivated rice. The interplay of these evolutionary forces gave rise to the cultivated species, Oryza sativa, with divergent genomic backgrounds from two wild species, ...

The application of genomic approaches to the phenomenon of plant domestication promises a better understanding of the origins of agriculture, but also of the way plant genomes in general are organized and expressed. Building on earlier genetic research, more detailed information has become available on the organization of genetic diversity at the genome level and the effects of gene flow on div...

Phenotypic variation has been manipulated by humans during crop domestication, which occurred primarily between 3000 and 10000 years ago in the various centers of origin around the world. The process of domestication has profound consequences on crops, where the domesticate has moderately reduced genetic diversity relative to the wild ancestor across the genome, and severely reduced diversity f...

Yak domestication represents an important episode in the early human occupation of the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP). The precise timing of domestication is debated and little is known about the underlying genetic changes that occurred during the process. Here we investigate genome variation of wild and domestic yaks. We detect signals of selection in 209 genes of domestic yaks, sev...

The domestication of plants and animals is a key transition in human history, and its profound and continuing impacts are the focus of a broad range of transdisciplinary research spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences. Three central aspects of domestication that cut across and unify this diverse array of research perspectives are addressed here. Domestication is defined as a dis...

This article acknowledges the vital role that the Domestication Research-perspective has in media research, but criticizes it for being analytically ambiguous in its use of the central term ‘domestication’. By way of a contrastive set of data from an ongoing research project, we argue for a dislocation of ‘domestication’ from the domestic and the private. Instead, we wish to retain the meaning ...

The genetic basis for morphological change in divergent species is a central question in evolutionary biology. The domestication of maize from its wild progenitor, teosinte, is an excellent system to address this question. We explore the large effect on domestication phenotypes of a poorly understood region of the maize genome using a chromosome five specific mapping population. Unlike other la...

BACKGROUND Archaeological evidence has revealed that barley (Hordeum vulgare) is one of the oldest crops used by ancient farmers. Studies of the time and place of barley domestication may help in understanding ancient human civilization. SCOPE The studies of domesticated genes in crops have uncovered the mechanisms which converted wild and unpromising wild species to the most important food f...