Paper Reviewed
Teixeira, J.E.C., Weldekidan, T., de Leon, N., Flint-Garcia, S., Holland, J.B., Lauter, N., Murray, S.C., Xu, W., Hessel, D.A., Kleintop, A.E., Hawk, J.A., Hallauer, A. and Wisser, R.J. 2015. Hallauer's Tuson: a decade of selection for tropical-to-temperate phonological adaptation in maize. Heredity 114: 229-240.

In considering the ever-increasing need to produce evermore food to support the world's ever-increasing human population, we are fortunate -- in the words of Teixeira et al. (2015) -- that "crop species exhibit an astounding capacity for environmental adaptation." But they note that "broadening the genetic base of maize in the USA and other parts of the world requires the use of tropical germplasm, which harbors unique (Liu et al., 2003) and favorable (Holland et al., 1996) genetic diversity." Therefore, as they describe it, they studied plant responses to selection by examining "the environmental range performance of Hallauer's Tuson, a maize population of tropical origin phenologically adapted to one location in central Iowa, through a decade of phenotypic selection for early flowering."

As for the results of their study, the thirteen researchers report that, on average, maize families from generation 10 flowered 20 days earlier than families in generation 0. And they state that this positive adaptation, as they describe it, "was primarily due to selection on genetic main effects tailored to temperature-dependent plasticity in flowering time," evidencing, as they describe it, "the potential for genetic adaptation to help mitigate vulnerabilities of crops to the effects of climate change and other stressors," additionally citing in this regard the studies of Craufurd and Wheeler (2009) and Butler and Huybers (2012). And as they indicate in their paper's concluding paragraph, these changes in plant behavior could nowadays "be sped by the use of marker-assisted selection procedures," which fact suggests that mankind is well equipped to successfully deal with global food production in a significantly warming world.

References
Butler, E.E. and Huybers, P. 2012. Adaptation of US maize to temperature variations. Nature Climate Change 3: 68-72.

Craufurd, P.Q. and Wheeler, T.R. 2009. Climate change and the flowering time of annual crops. Journal of Experimental Botany 60: 2529-2539.

Holland, J.B., Goodman, M.M. and Castillo-Gonzalez, F. 1996. Identification of agronomically superior latin american maize accessions via multi-stage evaluations. Crop Science 36: 778-784.

Liu, K., Goodman, M., Muse, S., Smith, J.S., Buckler, E. and Doebley, J. 2003. Genetic structure and diversity among maize inbred lines as inferred from DNA microsatellites. Genetics 165: 2117-2128.