Teosinte

Teosinte is the common name for wild relatives of maize in the genus Zea. These grasses are useful for studying domestication because they preserve combinations of branching and reproductive traits that differ strikingly from cultivated maize. The name covers multiple wild forms rather than one uniform species.

Compared with the strongly dominant main shoot of typical cultivated maize, its wild progenitor has much more lateral branching. Experiments on teosinte branched1 connected part of this difference to altered gene expression and suppression of branch growth.^[ref] A familiar food crop can thus illuminate evolution: conspicuous differences in plant architecture can arise partly through changes in the regulation of an existing developmental system.