Oryza glaberrima not shatter, making the grains easy for humans to gather. A mutation that caused rice not to shatter would probably have been the beginning of domestication. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recorded rice couscous in the area of present-day Mali in 1350. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese sailed to the Southern Rivers area in West Africa and wrote that the land was rich in rice. "<nowiki>[T]</nowiki>hey said they found the country covered by vast crops, with many cotton trees and large fields planted in rice … the country looked to them as having the aspect of a pond (i.e.,
12-oxophytodienoate reductase 12-oxophytodienoate reductase 12-oxophytodienoate reductase (OPRs) is an enzyme of the family of Old Yellow Enzymes (OYE). OPRs are grouped into two groups: OPRI and OPRII – the second group is the focus of this article, as the function of the first group is unknown, but is the subject of current research. The OPR enzyme utilizes the cofactor flavin mononucleotide (FMN) and catalyzes the following reaction in the jasmonic acid synthesis pathway: This reaction occurs in peroxisomes in plants. Several isozymes have been discovered, with varying substrate stereospecificity: three in "Lycopersicon esculentum", 13 in "Oryza sativa", and five in "Arabidopsis thaliana".