The Journal Nature Genetics published on 24 November 2010 an editorial about crop plant breeding and genetics. According to the editors, “the field of genetics owes its existence and most of its methods to agriculture. This year, genomic strategies and tools have notably begun to pay back the favor. Crop plants may be not only the discipline’s most readily translated applications but also its most fruitful model organisms.”
The editors also praise the attention that has been recently given to agricultural plant genetics. Nature Genetics have devoted three covers of the journal to this field in the last quarter of this year. They indicated that research being produced by plant geneticists is as interesting to readers as the usually more fashionable biomedical research.
The editorial argues that “genetics is an integrative area of study, and it is worth taking the time to consider the whole range of skills it teaches, from sequencing recombinant DNA to cytogenetics to statistical models of population evolution” and that “the discipline is at its most productive when strategies grown in one crop cross-fertilize other fields”.