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Crop breeding: Turning a lawn into a field

Nature Plants volume 3, Article number: 17060 (2017) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 20 April 2017

A genetic screen in the model panicoid grass Setaria viridis reveals the importance of the auxin transporter AUX1 for inflorescence branching in maize, highlighting how model plants can accelerate gene discovery in complex crops.

Domestication of grasses for use as food and animal feed started thousands of years ago. The selective pressure on these crop plants was driven by the need to maximize grain yield, which has increased towards the high levels seen today in the elite, commercial grass crop cultivars currently grown throughout the world. This need is now accentuated by the ever-rising human population and climate change, in addition to the urgent necessity to develop biofuel crops that do not compete with agricultural food production. Agronomic trait selection is a long and difficult process, and despite the myriad of genetic resources available for major crops such as maize, the gene identification process remains time consuming and unpredictable. This is particularly true for developmental aspects such as panicle architecture, which is one of the primary control points influencing grain yield. In this issue of Nature Plants, Huang and colleagues1 demonstrate a fast translational pipeline from discoveries in the grass model Setaria viridis to maize.

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Figure 1: Genome complexity in crops and model grasses.

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  1. Richard Sibout is at the Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin, UMR1318 INRA-AgroParisTech, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 78026 Versailles, France.,

    Richard Sibout

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  1. Richard Sibout
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Correspondence to Richard Sibout.

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Sibout, R. Crop breeding: Turning a lawn into a field. Nature Plants 3, 17060 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2017.60

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