Plant Sciences Commons^™

Genetic Dissection Of The Morphological Evolution Of Maize, John Doebley

Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany

Maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) and its wild progenitor, teosinte (Z. mays ssp. parviglumis) differ dramatically in inflorescence and plant architecture despite the fact that their evolutionary divergence occurred within the past 10,000 years or less. To elucidate the genetic control of the morphological differences between maize and teosinte, my colleague and I employed quantitative trait locus mapping with molecular markers. Results indicated that most of the variation in plant and inflorescence morphology between maize and teosinte can be explained by five restricted regions of the genome. In this paper, characterization of three of these regions …