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Annals of Botany 2007 100(5):893-901; doi:10.1093/aob/mcm224
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© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

From Crop Domestication to Super-domestication

D. A. Vaughan1,*, E. Balázs2 and J. S. Heslop-Harrison3

1 National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Kannondai 2–1–2, Tsukuba 305-8602, Ibaraki, Japan
2 Agriculture Research Institute, Department of Applied Genomics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Brunszvik u2, Martonvasar 2462, Hungary
3 Department of Biology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

* For correspondence. E-mail duncan{at}affrc.go.jp

Received: 3 August 2007    Returned for revision: 15 August 2007    Accepted: 20 August 2007   

Research related to crop domestication has been transformed by technologies and discoveries in the genome sciences as well as information-related sciences that are providing new tools for bioinformatics and systems' biology. Rapid progress in archaeobotany and ethnobotany are also contributing new knowledge to understanding crop domestication. This sense of rapid progress is encapsulated in this Special Issue, which contains 18 papers by scientists in botanical, crop sciences and related disciplines on the topic of crop domestication. One paper focuses on current themes in the genetics of crop domestication across crops, whereas other papers have a crop or geographic focus. One feature of progress in the sciences related to crop domestication is the availability of well-characterized germplasm resources in the global network of genetic resources centres (genebanks). Germplasm in genebanks is providing research materials for understanding domestication as well as for plant breeding. In this review, we highlight current genetic themes related to crop domestication. Impressive progress in this field in recent years is transforming plant breeding into crop engineering to meet the human need for increased crop yield with the minimum environmental impact – we consider this to be ‘super-domestication’. While the time scale of domestication of 10 000 years or less is a very short evolutionary time span, the details emerging of what has happened and what is happening provide a window to see where domestication might – and can – advance in the future.

Key words: Evolution, gene cloning, gene pyramiding, gene duplication, marker assisted selection, QTL, crop wild relatives


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