Ironically, most crop grasses were originally successful weeds.
Alcoholic beverages are distilled from other crop grasses: barley provides beer malt, rice is used in the production of sake, and corn for bourbon.
Up to 70 percent of the world's agricultural land is given to crop grasses, and more than 50 percent of the world's calories come from grasses, particularly the cereals.
Increasingly, exploring the phylogenetic context of the crop grasses will suggest new ways to identify and create combinations of morphological traits that will best suit our future needs.
To examine whether Brachypodium relatedness to important crop grasses is maintained at the level of cell wall composition, we compared the monosaccharide composition of stem cell wall from several grass species with that of Arabidopsis, a well-characterised dicot model.
Maize and other panicoid crop grasses have been selected for a decrease in both tillering and axillary branching, but even elite maize varieties will show vegetative branching under ideal growing conditions without competition (Moulia et al., 1999).
CMap was originally written in 2001 for Gramene, a comparative mapping resource for crop grasses, and has since been contributed to the generic model organism web site (GMOD) project under the GNU Public License.
While comparative genetic and genomic efforts between the major crop grasses are now commonplace (Devos, 2005), spurred by the hope that it might be possible to generalize genetic discoveries in one cereal crop to other cereal crops, our increasing understanding of the phylogenetic context of the cereal grasses is not so widely appreciated.
Because previous work found that the VSR of CYDV-RPS possessed greater silencing suppressor efficiency than that of CYDV-RPV, we further explored (iii) whether a novel grass-associated CYDV-RPS isolate would influence a native non-crop grass more strongly than a comparable CYDV-RPV isolate.
Specifically, we ask (i) whether CYDVs might persist within and affect a native non-crop grass more strongly than BYDV-PAV, on the grounds that the polerovirus VSR could better moderate the defenses of a well-defended perennial, and (ii) whether the opposite pattern of effects might occur in a less defended annual crop.
