Cultivated soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is a primary source of vegetable oil and protein. We report a landscape analysis of genome-wide genetic variation and an association study of major domestication and agronomic traits in soybean. A total of 106 soybean genomes representing wild, landraces, and elite lines were re-sequenced at an average of 17x depth with a 97.5% coverage. Over 10 milli...

Genomic technologies for livestock and companion animal species have revolutionized the study of animal domestication, allowing an increasingly detailed description of the genetic changes accompanying domestication and breed development. This review describes important recent results derived from the application of population and quantitative genetic approaches to the study of genetic changes i...

The challenge of studying human cognitive evolution is identifying unique features of our intelligence while explaining the processes by which they arose. Comparisons with nonhuman apes point to our early-emerging cooperative-communicative abilities as crucial to the evolution of all forms of human cultural cognition, including language. The human self-domestication hypothesis proposes that the...

Genealogical patterns in different genomic regions may be different due to the joint influence of gene flow and selection. The existence of two subspecies of cultivated rice provides a unique opportunity for analyzing these effects during domestication. We chose 66 accessions from the three rice taxa (about 22 each from Oryza sativa indica, O. sativa japonica, and O. rufipogon) for whole-genome...

Inflorescence architecture is a key agronomical factor determining grain yield, and thus has been a major target of cereal crop domestication. Transition from a spread panicle typical of ancestral wild rice (Oryza rufipogon Griff.) to the compact panicle of present cultivars (O. sativa L.) was a crucial event in rice domestication. Here we show that the spread panicle architecture of wild rice ...

This study investigated the translation strategies of culture-specific items in translation of 'Othello' by William Shakespeare into Persian by Abdolhossein Nooshin. First, the English culture-specific items and their corresponding translations were identified. Then, the frequency of the strategies used by the translator according to Newmark's translation model and Venuti's domestication and fo...

MADS-box genes encode transcription factors that are key regulators of plant inflorescence and flower development. We examined DNA sequence variation in 32 maize MADS-box genes and 32 randomly chosen maize loci and investigated their involvement in maize domestication and improvement. Using neutrality tests and a test based on coalescent simulation of a bottleneck model, we identified eight MAD...

Cereal agriculture originated with the domestication of barley and early forms of wheat in the Fertile Crescent. There has long been speculation that barley was domesticated more than once. We use differences in haplotype frequency among geographic regions at multiple loci to infer at least two domestications of barley; one within the Fertile Crescent and a second 1,500-3,000 km farther east. T...

Relative to crop plants, the domestication of forest trees is still in its infancy. For example, the domestication of many crop plants was initiated some 10,000 years ago in the so-called 'Fertile Crescent' of the Middle East. By contrast, the domestication of forest trees for the purposes of producing more fibre began in earnest in the last half century. The application of biotechnology to for...

The process of crop domestication began 10,000 years ago in the transition of early humans from hunter/gatherers to pastoralists/farmers. Recent research has revealed the identity of some of the main genes responsible for domestication. Two of the major domestication events in barley were (i) the failure of the spike to disarticulate and (ii) the six-rowed spike. The former mutation increased g...