Many centers of crop domestication and diversity are experiencing rapid changes in agriculture practices resulting in the loss of crop varieties and the knowledge and customs that have sustained them (Brush 2004; Harlan 1975). Germplasm diversity is threatened by several factors including: replacement by high-yielding varieties, a shift to cash crop cultivation, change in land use, economic inc...

Gene flow of transgenes into non-target populations is an important biosafety concern. The case of genetically modified (GM) maize in Mexico has been of particular interest because of the country's status as center of origin and landrace diversity. In contrast to maize in the U.S. and Europe, Mexican landraces form part of an evolving metapopulation in which new genes are subject to evolutionar...

White lupin is one of the four economically important species of the Lupinus genus and is an important grain legume in the Ethiopian farming system. However, there has been limited research effort to characterize the Ethiopian white lupin landraces. Fifteen polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were used to assess the genetic diversity and population structure of 212 Ethiopian white ...

The nuclear proteomes of maize (Zea mays) lines that differ in UV-B tolerance were compared by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis after UV light treatment. Differential accumulation of chromatin proteins, particularly histones, constituted the largest class identified by mass spectrometry. UV-B-tolerant landraces and the B73 inbred line show twice as many protein changes as the UV-B-sensitive ...

Deleterious alleles have long been proposed to play an important role in patterning phenotypic variation and are central to commonly held ideas explaining the hybrid vigor observed in the offspring of a cross between two inbred parents. We test these ideas using evolutionary measures of sequence conservation to ask whether incorporating information about putatively deleterious alleles can infor...

BACKGROUND Barley is the number one food crop in the highland parts of North Eastern Ethiopia produced by subsistence farmers grown as landraces. Information on the ethnobotany, food utilization and maintenance of barley landraces is valuable to design and plan germplasm conservation strategies as well as to improve food utilization of barley. METHODS A study, involving field visits and house...

Landraces are heterogeneous plant varieties that are reproduced by farmers as populations that are subject to both artificial and natural selection. Landraces are distinguished by farmers due to their specific traits, and different farmers often grow different populations of the same landrace. We used simple sequence repeats (SSRs) to analyse 12 barley landrace populations from Sardinia from tw...

The introduction of mechanized agricultural practices after the Second World War and use productive hybrids led to a gradual disappearance local maize varieties. However, 13 landraces are still cultivated in North-Western Italy, Lombardy region; those that mountainous areas (roughly up 1200 m altitude) often characterized by pointed shape their seeds (i.e., “Nero Spinoso”, “Rostrato Rosso di Ro...

The present chapter focuses on recommending a set of tools and policy options to manage potential risks and to enhance potential benefits derived from applications of gene modification (GM) of plants through modern biotechnology in maize (Zea maize). Specific questions to be addressed in the chapter—with particular reference to the situation in Mexico—include the following: Rationale for applyi...

Polished rice is poor source of micronutrients, however wide genotypic variability exists for zinc uptake and remobilization and zinc content in brown and polished grains in rice. Two landraces (Chittimutyalu and Kala Jeera Joha) and one popular improved variety (BPT 5204) were grown under zinc sufficient soil and their analyses showed high zinc in straw of improved variety, but high zinc in po...