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.,
Plant genome assembly products were used to clone remaining gaps, and YACs allowed the characterization of telomere sequences. The resulting sequenced regions were 115.4 Mb of the 125 Mb predicted size of the genome and a total of 25,498 of protein-coding genes. To sequence and assemble the genome of Oryza Sativa (japonica), the same strategy was used. For Oryza Sativa a total of 3,401 mapped clones in a minimum tiling path were selected from the physical map and assembled. One of the most important crops in the world, maize (Zea mays), is the last plant genome project primarily based on Sanger BAC-by-BAC strategy.