People in some regions of the world still lose a lot of their crop because the grains fall off too easily. There's a lot of time and energy that goes into taking care of these crops, so you want to make sure at the end you don't lose a lot of it. |
Several hundred hours were spent in the greenhouses where we had to shake the plants and record the various degrees of shattering. Even with all the advances in technology, a careful firsthand observation proves to be essential for biological research. |
This technical innovation will greatly speed up genetic research for plants since it saved us time and money, yet delivered accurate results. |
What we can learn from historical plant domestication will benefit our ongoing and future effort to domesticate energy crops that will be equally important to the long-term sustainability of our society. It is remarkable how the earliest farmers could have selected a single mutation in DNA to develop a major food crop of the world. |