The cereals are the most important food crops in the world. Many companies are now engaged in a race to identify genes that control valuable cereal traits, particularly yield, but so far the genes remain elusive.
Most current approaches provide an unwieldy and impractical surplus of genes to analyze.
Yet, published analyses demonstrate that only 15 to 20 genes control nearly all the commercially sought traits in cereals. Clearly, humans selected for enhanced yield and desirable nutritional qualities as they domesticated cereals. EG s approach will directly identify genes underlying such commercially valuable traits. Taking Advantage of Evolution Humans have bred cereal crops for many thousands of years, selecting for a suite of desired traits, including yield, protein and oil content, short day-length flowering, ease of harvesting, and taste. Genes that have incorporated protein-coding changes under a strong selective pressure, whether that pressure is from natural evolution or the artificial selection of human domestication, can be identified using molecular evolution analysis.