Clonal crops show structural variation role in domestication.

The efficient use of clonal reproduction through vegetative propagation is one of the underlying reasons for the great success of the angiosperms, enabling stabilized and adapted phenotypes to rapidly expand into suitable environments1. This stability of phenotype has made clonal systems attractive for domestication, accounting for about half of all domesticated plants2. Despite the myth that clonal systems display little genetic variation having long been debunked3, they remain the poor relations in research, with relatively little known about how clonal systems adapt and evolve. Ironically, in this issue of Nature Plants, Zhou and colleagues4 show that it is precisely this quality of stable phenotype that make clonal systems suitable for demonstrating how genomic structural variation (SV) is a major driving force in the evolution of domesticates, and likely plants in general.