The high selection pressure applied in rice breeding since its domestication thousands of
years ago has caused a narrowing in its genetic variability. Obtaining new rice cultivars …

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the major food source for more than three billion people of the
world. In the last few decades, the classical, mutational, and molecular breeding approaches …

Maize (Zea mays) is one of the most important crops in the world. However, few
agronomically important maize genes have been cloned and used for trait improvement, due …

The availability of the B73 inbred reference genome sets the stage for high-throughput
functional characterization of maize genes on a whole-genome scale. Among the 39 324 …

Chemical mutagenesis efficiently generates phenotypic variation in otherwise
homogeneous genetic backgrounds, enabling functional analysis of genes. Advances in …

Progress in improving abiotic stress tolerance of crop plants using classic breeding and
selection approaches has been slow. This has generally been blamed on the lack of reliable …

Ancient DNA research has been revolutionized following development of next-generation
sequencing platforms. Although a number of such platforms have been applied to ancient …

Rice is a staple food for more than 3 billion people in more than 100 countries of the world
but ironically it is deficient in many bioavailable vitamins, minerals, essential amino-and fatty …

Epigenetic modifications play a vital role in the preservation of genome integrity and in the
regulation of gene expression. DNA methylation, one of the key mechanisms of epigenetic …

Next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based bulked-segregant analysis (BSA) approaches
have been proven successful for rapidly mapping genes in plant species. However, most …