ABSTRACT
The utilization of cereals has had a profound influence on the history of our species. The impact of cereals can hardly be overestimated. The most important cereals in the world are wheat, rice, and maize and there are many other cereals of lesser importance. Within the grass tribe Triticeae, wheat, barley, and rye are the most important cereals. In addition to these very well known species, other species in the Triticeae tribe are useful as forages or possess agronomically valuable traits for wheat and barley improvement (e.g., disease-resistance genes, perennial habit, salt and drought tolerance, early ripening, and dwarfing genes). The family Gramineae is divided into five subfamilies and 43 tribes, only seven of which contain cereal crops, and tribe Triticeae is one among the seven. This chapter presents a study that aims to clarify the phylogenetic relationships in the tribe Triticeae with two different approaches based on chloroplast DNA restriction fragment variation and with consensus tRNA primer amplification products.
