Oryza glaberrima rice-growing skills, as the high price of rice made it a major cash crop. The tolerance of African rice for brackish water meant it could be grown on coastal deltas, as it was in West Africa. There are numerous stories about how the rice came to North America, including a slave smuggling grains in her hair and a ship driven in to trade by a storm. African rice is a rare crop in Brazil, Guyana, El Salvador and Panama, but it is still occasionally grown there. There are also native South American rices, which makes it hard to recognize the
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