Unique Gene Combinations Control Tropical Maize Response to Day Lengths
June 24, 2011| |
Tropical maize when grown in the United States were found to respond to summer day lengths by flowering late, resulting to poor yield and hindering breeding work to improve the US Corn Belt maize line. To study this problem, tropical maize from Mexico and Thailand were crossed with standard Corn Belt maize line. Scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service and North Carolina State University identified four regions of the maize genome that control much of the photoperiod response in maize.
Research results published in the Crop Science Society of America show that "the effects of tropical genes differed, depending on which tropical variety they were bred from." They also discovered that genes from tropical varieties did not have uniform effects on delayed flowering at the genome region, for example, one of the tropical varieties carried genes that made plants flower earlier than the standard Corn Belt variety.
Ongoing research is focused on identifying the specific genes controlling day length response that exist in these regions.
The original news can be seen at https://www.crops.org/news-media/releases/2011/0614/480/
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