Today’s white rice is mutation spread by early farmers, researchers say

Posted by Jimalakirti in Evolution
at 1:14 pm on Wednesday, 10 March 2010

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug07/WhiteRice.kr.html

Some 10,000 years ago white rice evolved from wild red rice and began spreading around the globe. But how did this happen?

Researchers at Cornell and elsewhere have determined that 97.9 percent of all white rice is derived from a mutation (a deletion of DNA) in a single gene originating in theJaponica subspecies of rice. Their report, published online in the journal PloS (Public Library of Science) Genetics, suggests that early farmers favored, bred and spread white rice around the world.

(CornellOnline, August 16, 2007)

Comments (1)

Comments(1)

    Comment by Jimalakirti at 1:51 pm on 10 March 2010 at

    This article is a couple of years old, but is a good article. I am going to collect a series of articles on the evolution of the grasses and how the mammals of the Miocene Epoch (20m to 10 million years ago) evolved to take advantage of the expanding, grassy, savanna. I will also include cultivation by early cultures.