Molecular Diversity, Structure and Domestication of Grasses

Over the last 10,000 years, crop domestication has been the single most important human cultural development. Grasses are prominent among these crops, and provide the vast majority of the world\u27s food. Similar traits have been selected during the domestication and breeding of these critically important grasses, and since they share a similar complement of genes, the same set of genes may have been selected. Even though the process of domestication occurred over the same 5000 to 10,000 year period, the domesticated grasses have major differences in genome structure, diversity, and life history. Molecular investigations of grass domestication have succeeded in identifying progenitor species and are beginning to catalog genetic resources. Additionally, research is now elucidating some of the basic processes by which crops have evolved over the last few millennia. In this review, we discuss our present knowledge of molecular diversity among the grass crops and relate that diversity to the genes involved in domestication and to yield gains. Understanding the connection between diversity and genome structure will be critical to future crop breeding

Ten simple rules to ruin a collaborative environment

Trigger warning: Here, you will find a bit of satire, written from the not-so-funny, real experiences of the authors who have been involved in “team science” collaboratives. The material presented below covers topics that readers may find offensive or even traumatizing. We present a breakdown (pun intended) of how to ruin a functioning collaboration, rather than how to build one. The ideas contained in this work were developed during two virtual meetings of members of the Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI; www.ag2pi.org) community and leadership team in May and June of 2021. In these sessions, we looked back at collaborative projects that were miserable failures and recalled what went wrong so we could avoid making the same mistakes in the future. We also considered what signals we might have missed that could have saved us some misery and where we might have had some blind spots (but should have seen coming). As a side note, having worked on dysfunctional teams from time to time, we found writing this set of rules to be both cathartic and vastly cheaper than therapy. If you are not prepared for what will likely be the occasional, “Yikes, that sounds terribly familiar!” or would rather read some more upbeat advice, here are a few options we recommend: Vicens and Bourne [1], de Grijs [2], Knapp and colleagues [3], Cechova [4], Sahneh and colleagues [5], and Gewin [6].This article is published as Lawrence-Dill CJ, Allscheid RL, Boaitey A, Bauman T, Buckler ES IV, Clarke JL, et al. (2022) Ten simple rules to ruin a collaborative environment. PLoS Comput Biol 18(4): e1009957. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009957. Works produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted