Oryza sativa seen carved into the ninth-century Prambanan temples in Central Java. In the 16th century, Europeans visiting the Indonesian islands saw rice as a new prestige food served to the aristocracy during ceremonies and feasts. Rice production in Indonesian history is linked to the development of iron tools and the domestication of water buffalo for cultivation of fields and manure for fertilizer. Once covered in dense forest, much of the Indonesian landscape has been gradually cleared for permanent fields and settlements as rice cultivation developed over the last 1500 years. In the Philippines, the greatest evidence of rice cultivation since ancient
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.