I recently had the opportunity to travel to Hyderabad, India.
Traveling always provides a new perspective; my trip it provided
some perspective on how we may view native plants here in South
Florida. Some of my research is on the genetics of native
plants, and some is on the genetics of crop plants. I was
visiting ICRISAT, the International Crop Research Institute of
the Semi-Arid Tropics. ICRISAT breeds improved pigeonpea,
chickpea, peanuts, sorghum, and pearl millet, five important
tropical crops. With my collaborators Drs Doug Cook and Varma
Penmetsa of the University of California at Davis, we visited
Dr. Rajeev Varshney and his excellent research group in
ICRISAT’s Center for Excellence in Genomics to discuss a project
examining the consequences of domestication in chickpea. Most of
the crops on which we rely are grown on vast acreages far beyond
the area in which our ancestors originally domesticated the
crop. Many plant species have a limited natural range. For
example, corn (maize) was domesticated fr