Foreword to 'Legume Genomics and Genetics'

Crop cultivation has a long history in human civilization, with records showing the cultivation of cereal plants beginning at around 8000 BC. This early plant breeding was developed primarily to provide a steady supply of food.

Most plants are seed plants—characterized by seeds, pollen, and reduced gametophytes. Seed plants include gymnosperms and angiosperms.

Genomics is the science of genomes: it is the study of all the genetic material of an organism. In humans, the genome consists of information carried in 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus, as well as mitochondrial DNA. In genomics, both coding and non-coding DNA is sequenced and analyzed. Genomics allows a better understanding of all living things, their evolution, and their diversity. It has a myriad of uses: for example, to build phylogenetic trees, to improve productivity and...

From Water to Land

While every living organism has a genome of some kind (be it RNA, or DNA), there is considerable variation in the sizes of these blueprints. One major factor that impacts genome size is whether the organism is prokaryotic or eukaryotic. In prokaryotes, the genome contains little to no non-coding sequence, such that genes are tightly clustered in groups or operons sequentially along the chromosome. Conversely, the genes in eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of non-coding sequence.