To most of us on the Prairies, the sunflower is a familiar sight — tall, bold, and bright. But beneath those sunny blooms lies something a lot more surprising: a genetic system as wild and unpredictable as the Western sky.
Loren Rieseberg, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, recently shared some eye-opening insights at the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in Kona, Hawai’i. He’s spent decades digging into the sunflower genome and what he’s found could change the way we think about breeding crops for Western Canadian conditions.
Turns out, sunflowers — both wild and cultivated — have highly unusual genetic structures. Rather than small, gradual changes, many of the traits farmers care about are linked to big structural shifts in the plant’s genome: things like deleted or duplicated chunks of DNA, or even entire chromosome sections flipped upside-down.
“These aren’t rare,” says Rieseberg. “They’re everywhere. Structural changes are the norm, not the exception.”
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