Brachypodium is actually a wild annual grass plant, native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, with little agricultural importance and is of no major economic value itself. But it allows researchers to obtain genetic information for grasses much more easily than some of its related, but larger and more complex counterparts with much larger genomes – plants which are hugely important in world nutrition.‘Some plants are a geneticist’s nightmare,’ said Todd Mockler, a principal investigator on this project and assistant professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. ‘Wheat, for instance, is an important crop, but it has an enormous and complex genome five times larger than a human.
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