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The huge ears of modern corn look nothing like the ears of teosinte, corn's ancestor. The question is: How did modern corn get that way? As [Fedoroff][1] explains in her Perspective, molecular sleuthing reveals that just a few genetic changes in teosinte were sufficient to produce a progenitor of modern corn, which was then carefully selected over thousands of years by our farmer ancestors to produce the corn that we pop in microwaves today ([ Jaenicke et al .][2]). [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5648/1158 [2]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/302/5648/1206
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Nina V. Fedoroff (2003) studied this question.
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