Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
population genetics, ecology, and archaeology, and the synthesis of
fields into a coherent evolutionary description
of the rise of agriculture. Danny has published more than 100 peer-
reviewed papers; unlike most of his colleagues, he was also able to
summarize his life work in a comprehensive topic on plant domestica-
tion, which was published in four successful editions (Zohary and Hopf
1988, 1993, 2000; Zohary et al. 2012).
findings obtained in these
I. EARLY DAYS
Danny Zohary was born in Jerusalem in 1926. As a teenager with a
botanist father, Danny became familiar with the rich
flora of the Holy
Land and the Middle East and, as a student, already started to look into
relationships between plant species, at the level of plant communities
and their interaction with ecological factors, and over time, as evolu-
tionary relationships. As an undergraduate student in Botany and
Geology at the Hebrew University, Zohary
'
s studies were interrupted
-
in 1947
1949 by his active participation in the Israeli War of Indepen-
dence; eventually he graduated in 1951. In 1952 he started his Ph.D.
studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his scienti
c
interests took him in two parallel and equally productive directions. For
his thesis work with G. Ledyard Stebbins, he investigated the relation-
ships between diploid and tetraploid forms of
Dactylis glomerata
,a
common Mediterranean grass. The
Dactylis
complex provided a good
example of the success of autotetraploidy, as well as of diploid
-
tetraploid hybrids and gene
flow in natural populations, and the preva-
lence of supernumerary chromosomes. These studies continued upon
Zohary
'
s return to Israel in 1956, and subsequently he became one of the
world
s experts on polyploidy (both auto- and allopolyploidy), following
his mentor Stebbins. The second line of research Zohary undertook
while being a graduate student at Berkeley was that of cytogenetics of
meiosis in plants, under the guidance of Spencer W. Brown. The most
important outcome of these studies was the proof that cytologically
observed chiasmata in lily and in maize resulted from previously
occurring crossing over events (Brown and Zohary 1955; Zohary
1955), in contrast to the alternative interpretation that chiasmata
resulted from overlapping chromatids, which provided opportunities
for crossover events (that subsequently did or did not take place).
In the following years, Zohary
'
s interests and academic activities
continued along three main tracts of plant biology and agriculture:
(i) the genetic relationships among closely related plant species and
'
