LAUSR

Crop domestication has fundamentally altered the course of human history, causing a shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies and stimulating the rise of modern civilization. A greater understanding of crop domestication would provide a theoretical basis for how we could improve current crops and develop new crops to deal with environmental challenges in a sustainable manner. Here, we comprehensively summarize the similarities and differences in the domestication processes of maize and rice, two major staple food crops that feed the world. We demonstrate that maize and rice might have evolved distinct genetic solutions toward domestication. It appears that maize and rice domestication are associated with distinct regulatory and evolutionary mechanisms. Rice domestication tended to select de novo, loss-of-function, coding variation, while maize domestication more frequently favored standing, gain-of-function, regulatory variation. At gene network level, distinct genetic paths were employed to acquire convergent phenotypes in maize and rice domestication, during which different central genes were utilized, orthologous genes played different evolutionary roles, and new genes or regulatory modules were acquired for establishing new traits. Finally, we discuss how the knowledge gained from past domestication processes, together with emerging technologies, could be exploited to improve modern crop breeding and domesticate new crops to meet new human demands.