Submission statement:Ornob Alam is an evolutionary biologist at New York University, where he researches the processes of rice’s domestication and subsequent dispersal. New methodological advances have allowed researchers to estimate how far back in time two rice plant individuals diverged based on the number of differences that have accumulated in their respective genomic blocks and the known mutation rates in rice.
In their study of japonica rice, Alam’s team used this method to reinforce the importance of underlying genetic variation in wild rice species for domestication, as well as support the prevailing idea among archaeologists of domestication as a slow, multi-stage process that took place over thousands of years.
[OP] The_Conversation | a day ago
Submission statement: Ornob Alam is an evolutionary biologist at New York University, where he researches the processes of rice’s domestication and subsequent dispersal. New methodological advances have allowed researchers to estimate how far back in time two rice plant individuals diverged based on the number of differences that have accumulated in their respective genomic blocks and the known mutation rates in rice.
In their study of japonica rice, Alam’s team used this method to reinforce the importance of underlying genetic variation in wild rice species for domestication, as well as support the prevailing idea among archaeologists of domestication as a slow, multi-stage process that took place over thousands of years.