Catherine Nancarrow's blog

2009 PLoS Genetics Maize Genome Collection PLoS Genetics is pleased to announce the launch of the 2009 Maize Genome Collection. Maize is an important crop in many countries of the world. It is used widely for human consumption, animal feed, and industrial materials. It is also considered an exemplar plant species for studying domestication, molecular evolution, and genome architecture. The authors of the research presented in this special collection used the first description of the B73 maize genome to probe some of the most intriguing questions in genetics and plant biology. The ten papers consider maize centromeres, new insights into transposon types and distribution, the abundance of very short FLcDNAs encoding predicted peptides, and many other “genetic jewels”.