Oryza sativa sprang from a single domestication that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in China of the wild rice "Oryza rufipogon". A 2012 study, through a map of rice genome variation, indicated that the domestication of rice occurred in the Pearl River valley region of China. From East Asia, rice was spread to South and Southeast Asia. Before this research, the commonly accepted view, based on archaeological evidence, is that rice was first domesticated in the region of the Yangtze River valley in China. The precise date of the first domestication is unknown, but depending on the molecular clock estimate, the date is
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.