ABSTRACT
The basic principle of survival among wild cereals depends on their ability to adapt for a long period of inactivity. Their success requires the efficacy of synchronizing cycles of growth, reproduction, and rest with changing seasons. When cereal agriculture spread to more maritime climates, the need to regain some of the seed dormancy as a protection against preharvest sprouting. The understanding of the dormancy mechanism in seeds of wild cereals is thus not only of academic but also of great practical concern. The opportunistic strategy of the annual wild cereals made them just as well fitted to proceed as cultivars as weeds. In features where wild and weedy relatives tend to differ, the weedy and cultivated forms instead show coevolution. Since these two groups inhabit the same type of land, occur intermixed, and can intermate, gene migration in both directions can occur more or less easily. All our cereals originate from regions where drought and high temperature promote seed dormancy.
