A new study shows an inserted retroelement in the regulatory sequences of the maize tb1 gene, which controls shoot branching, was the target of human selection during the domestication of maize from its wild relative teosinte. The insertion allele was already present at low frequency in teosinte populations before selection, highlighting the significance of standing genetic variation in the evolution of morphological diversity.
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Change history
27 April 2012
In the version of this article initially published, a study by Studer et al. was incorrectly cited as being by Deng et al. The correct sentence should read: "Studer et al. present a clear picture of how maize was domesticated by events operating at different scales: biological and cultural5." The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Tsiantis, M. A transposon in tb1 drove maize domestication. Nat Genet 43, 1048–1050 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.986
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.986
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