Combining genomics with farmers' traditional knowledge to improve wheat production
Monday, July 17, 2017 - 11:02
in Biology & Nature
Producing better crops to meet the needs of the growing world's population may lie in combining the traditional knowledge of subsistence farmers with plant genomics. Researchers in Italy and Ethiopia demonstrated that the indigenous knowledge of traditional farmers, passed on from one generation to generation, can be measured in a quantitative way and used with advanced genomic and statistical methods to identify genes responsible for farmers' preference of wheat.