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Science 14 November 2003:
Vol. 302. no. 5648, pp. 1158 - 1159
DOI: 10.1126/science.1092042
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Perspectives

AGRICULTURE:
Prehistoric GM Corn

Nina V. Fedoroff

The huge ears of modern corn look nothing like the ears of teosinte, corn's ancestor. The question is: How did modern corn get that way? As Fedoroff explains in her Perspective, molecular sleuthing reveals that just a few genetic changes in teosinte were sufficient to produce a progenitor of modern corn, which was then carefully selected over thousands of years by our farmer ancestors to produce the corn that we pop in microwaves today (Jaenicke et al.).

The author is at the Huck Institute for Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: nvf1{at}psu.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)