Grasses, Synteny, Evolution, and Molecular Systematics

The grass family (Gramineae or Poaceae) is economically and ecologically the most important of the families of flowering plants; members of the family such as maize, wheat, and rice provide about half of the caloric consumption of humanity. Many grasses also use high-efficiency (C4) photosynthesis, a pathway that has originated many times independently within the family. The family is divided into 12 monophyletic subfamilies. Extensive genomic data are available for many grasses. Grass genomes are largely colinear, which aids positional cloning in species for which genome sequences are unavailable.