Oryza glaberrima as part of the NERICA program. Breeding within the species is easier, and there are uncounted numbers of African rice varieties, although the majority may have been lost. A similar crossed variety was bred in the United States in 2011, and work is being done on crosses with Indian rice varieties. There are a great many varieties of African rice. In the 1960s older women in Jipalom (a village in the Ziguinchor Region) could unhesitatingly name more than ten varieties of African rice that were no longer planted, besides the half-dozen that were then still being planted. Each woman would
Helitron (biology) Helitron (biology) Helitrons are one of the three groups of eukaryotic class 2 transposable elements (TEs) so far described. They are the eukaryotic rolling-circle transposable elements which are hypothesized to transpose by a rolling circle replication mechanism via a single-stranded DNA intermediate. They were first discovered in plants ("Arabidopsis thaliana" and "Oryza sativa") and in the nematode "Caenorhabditis elegans", and now they have been identified in a diverse range of species, from protists to mammals. Helitrons make up a substantial fraction of many genomes where non-autonomous elements frequently outnumber the putative autonomous partner. Helitrons seem to have a major role