Romping Through Maize Diversity

摘要

On a steamy July morning, Edward Buckler and a crew of technicians, graduate students, postdocs, and a visiting professor from Mexico have fanned out among the 2-meter stalks in a large field of corn here. Bar-code readers in hand, they snip, stretch, or poke individual plants in order to track dozens of traits important to the crop's growth and vitality. Each week, they record the height of every stalk; in early summer, they counted leaves, assessed surface "hairiness," and took small samples of tissue to freeze-dry and send to Germany.