Understanding Grass Domestication through Maize Mutants.

As an economically important model crop plant, rich in genetic resources, maize has been useful for uncovering the genetic pathways responsible for domestication and plant improvement. However, several of the pathways that have been shown by recent studies to be important for domestication and/or yield in other grasses function differently in maize. In several cases, this unexpectedly wide functional divergence between genes from closely related grasses appears to be due to alternative modes of regulation rather than to simple differences in protein function. This indicates that domestication genes need to be understood within the architecture of the whole genome and the species-specific processes that they influence before they can serve as the foundation to improve plants.