Research is being conducted to understand the development of teosinte into corn. The researchers of Iowa State University are drawing comparisons between corn and its wild ancestors, which would help them gather useful information.
The journal of Frontiers of Plant Science published that a new tool has been launched. That tool can be used to produce fertile teosinte plants with multiple genes.
Human beings are domesticating teosinte for so many years. People selected specific teosinte so that they could grow new varieties of unique traits.
The original genetic material of teosinte got lost due to that. The researchers wish to identify that original material to grow better corn.
Jacob Zobrist, an agronomy graduate student, believes that the identification of the traits of the wild ancestors can prove useful in many ways. For instance, it can help with stress and disease resistance. Moreover, it will open numerous possibilities for people inserted in Agricultural applied research.
Later, Jacob Zobrist joined Wang’s lab and developed the tool with the support of the National Science Foundation’s Predictive Plant Phenomics Fellowship. Zobrist shares that without this tool, it would have been difficult to understand the teosinte.