The prestigious journal Science features a cover story on the work of UC Davis plant scientists Jorge Dubcovsky and Jan Dvorak in its current issue. The article is not written at the eigth-grade reading level, the typical goal of the general media. For the reader willing to devote some extra concentration, and perhaps look up a few words in the dictionary, there are many interesting facts. For example, the article says 620 million tons of wheat are produced annually worldwide, providing about one-fifth of the calories consumed by humans. About 95 percent of the wheat crop is common wheat, used for making bread, cookies, and pastries, and the other 5 percent is durum wheat, used for making pasta and other semolina products.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agrarian lifestyles in western Asia was a threshold in the evolution of human societies, the authors wrote. Seeds of free-threshing wheat began to appear in archaeological sites about 10,000 years ago.
The article continues with Dubcovsky and Dvorak 's review of recent insights from molecular genetics and genomics "to understand how gene mutations and genome ploidy paved the way for successful domestication of modern cultivated wheat varieties."
From Websters: "ploidy n. the condition of having or lacking one or more chromosomes than the number found in the normal diploid set."
