The Italian Research on the Molecular Characterization of Maize Kernel Development

Abstract

The study of the genetic control of maize seed development and seed-related pathways has been one of the most important themes approached by the Italian scientific community. Maize has always attracted the interest of the Italian community of agricultural genetics since its beginning, as some of its founders based their research projects on and developed their “schools” by adopting maize as a reference species. Some of them spent periods in the United States, where maize was already becoming a model system, to receive their training. In this manuscript we illustrate the research work carried out in Italy by different groups that studied maize kernels and underline their contributions in elucidating fundamental aspects of caryopsis development through the characterization of maize mutants. Since the 1980s, most of the research projects aimed at the comprehension of the genetic control of seed development and the regulation of storage products’ biosyntheses and accumulation, and have been based on forward genetics approaches. We also document that for some decades, Italian groups, mainly based in Northern Italy, have contributed to improve the knowledge of maize genomics, and were both fundamental for further international studies focused on the correct differentiation and patterning of maize kernel compartments and strongly contributed to recent advances in maize research.

Understanding grain development in the Poaceae family by comparing conserved and distinctive pathways through omics studies in wheat and maize

“…Although a vast array of candidate genes linked to grain yield have been discovered through GWAS and QTL mapping, the molecular cloning of these genes in wheat is still relatively unexplored (see Tables 1 , 2 ). Unlike wheat, maize is a diploid species, the research on seeds development has greatly benefited from the investigation of mutator-induced mutant collections such as defective kernel ( dek ) mutants with affected development in both embryo and endosperm ( Neuffer and Sheridan, 1980 ; McCarty et al., 2005 ), empty pericarp ( emp ) mutants ( Scanlon et al., 1994 ), defective endosperm ( de ) or endosperm-specific mutant ( Consonni et al., 2022 ) and embryo specific ( emb ) mutants ( Clark and Sheridan, 1991 ). Those mutant collections provide abundant material for the molecular genetic analysis on the mechanisms of embryo and endosperm development allowing maize to become the leading system for molecular cloning of functional genes in plants.…”