Plant transformation has enabled fundamental insights into plant biology and revolutionized
commercial agriculture. Unfortunately, for most crops, transformation and regeneration …

Although heterosis, or hybrid vigor, is widely exploited in agriculture, a complete description
of its molecular underpinnings has remained elusive despite extensive investigation. It …

In this review, we discuss the recent research on allelic variation in maize and possible
implications of this work toward our understanding of heterosis. Heterosis, or hybrid vigor, is the …

We report an improved draft nucleotide sequence of the 2.3-gigabase genome of maize, an
important crop plant and model for biological research. Over 32,000 genes were predicted, …

Complete and accurate reference genomes and annotations provide fundamental tools for
characterization of genetic and functional variation 1 . These resources facilitate the …

Domestication and plant breeding are ongoing 10,000-year-old evolutionary experiments
that have radically altered wild species to meet human needs. Maize has undergone a …

Ancient tetraploidies are found throughout the eukaryotes. After duplication, one copy of
each duplicate gene pair tends to be lost (fractionate). For all studied tetraploidies, the loss of …

Following the domestication of maize over the past ∼10,000 years, breeders have exploited
the extensive genetic diversity of this species to mold its phenotype to meet human needs. …

Background DNA methylation is an important feature of plant epigenomes, involved in the
formation of heterochromatin and affecting gene expression. Extensive variation of DNA …

Background Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are transcripts that are 200 bp or longer, do
not encode proteins, and potentially play important roles in eukaryotic gene regulation. …