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An evolutionary genomic tale of two rice species

Nature Genetics volume 46, pages 931–932 (2014)Cite this article

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The domestication of African rice, Oryza glaberrima, occurred separately from that of the much more widespread Asian rice species Oryza sativa. Analysis of the whole-genome sequence for O. glaberrima shows the extent to which the same genes were involved in these distinct but parallel evolutionary events.

Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote that, if we rewound the tape of life and play it again, we would see a different movie1. Evolution, however, does repeat itself, and by studying parallel evolutionary events we learn important lessons. Crop domestication provides material to study evolutionary parallelisms2, and a remarkable example of such parallelism was found about 550 years ago as Portuguese explorers saw rice growing in the coastal areas of West Africa3. Asian rice, O. sativa, was known to Europeans from classical Roman times, but rice in West Africa constituted a different species, O. glaberrima. On page 982 of this issue4, Mingsheng Chen, Klaus Mayer, Steve Rounsley, Rod Wing and colleagues provide an analysis of the genome for African rice, equipping plant scientists with genetic tools to study the domestications of rice species that arose separately on two different continents.

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Figure 1: Parallel domestications of two rice species.

Debbie Maizels/Nature Publishing Group

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michael D. Purugganan is in the Department of Biology, Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, New York, New York, USA, and in the New York University Abu Dhabi Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.,

    Michael D Purugganan

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  1. Michael D Purugganan
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Correspondence to Michael D Purugganan.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Purugganan, M. An evolutionary genomic tale of two rice species. Nat Genet 46, 931–932 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3071

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