Rice is a pretty big deal. There’s really no need to justify research on this crop. It feeds literally billions, so the funding will always flow. Would that we knew rice as well as we know C. elgans. After yesterday’s travesty of a paper on barley I thought that readers might find a new paper in Nature, A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice, more interesting and illuminating. The authors used genomic sequencing, of varied coverage (i.e., very deep, repeated, and therefore accurate coverage vs. a single pass which is a very rough draft), to assess the relationship between Asian wild rice and two of the dominant domestic cultivars, indica (long-grain paddy rice) and japonica (short-grain dry cultivation rice). Presumably the two cultivars derive from a wild ancestor, but the details are still being hashed out.
Above I’ve summarized I think a good portion of the phylogenetic component of the paper, which attempts to resolve confusion in this area for rice. Basically the wild rice lineages are structured, and the two domestic cultivars …