That's why some coffee-industry experts favor expanding the varieties of coffee being cultivated and crossbreeding plants to strengthen them.

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For species, adaptations to novel environments and the need to avoid crossbreeding with those on the other side of the split are both plausible hypotheses.

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Some suspect the change has something to do with the evolution in how foods are grown and produced, like the crossbreeding of wheat or the use of antibiotics in cattle.

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You do this by crossbreeding mice that have had some of their cells treated this way when they were embryos, and have thus developed sex cells that lack the knocked-out gene.

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Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa.

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The resulting specimens will then be sorted and the best (ie, those that have flourished in the saline soils of Miyagi's paddies) selected for crossbreeding, in order to concentrate desirable mutations into reproducible lines of plants.

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Citrus bergamia, as it's known in botanical circles, first showed up 300 years ago in Southern Italy, the result of crossbreeding a sour orange with "something else, " variously identified as a citron, a lemon, a lime or a Palestine sweet lime.

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