Evolution of Domesticated Bread Wheat

The domestication of wheat around 10,000 years ago marked a dramatic turn in the development and evolution of human civilization, as it enabled the transition from a huntergatherer and nomadic pastoral society to a more sedentary agrarian one. Two of the most important traits in the evolution of bread wheat and other cultivated grasses were an increase in grain size and the development of nonshattering seed. The former has been associated with successful germination and growth of seedlings in cultivated fields, whereas the latter trait (a hallmark of domestication) prevents natural seed dispersal and allows humans to harvest and collect the seed with optimal timing (reviewed in Fuller, 2007; Purugganan and Fuller, 2009).

Gegas et al. (pages 1046-1056) provide insights into the evolution of domesticated wheat through large-scale morphometric and quantitative trait analyses of several recombinant doubled haploid populations of elite winter wheat and a...