Sometime in the millennia predating Biblical times, twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum) mated naturally with another grass, Triticum tauschii, yielding primordial forty-two-chromosome Triticum aestivum, genetically closest to what we now call wheat. Because it contains the sum total of the chromosomal content of three unique plants with forty-two chromosomes, it is the most genetically complex. It is therefore the most genetically “pliable,” an issue that will serve future genetics researchers well in the millennia to come.
