Made by Aliens?! The Mystery of Corn—and the New Variety Born in 2025 That Could Help Save Us From a Food Crisis

Developed by aliens? The mystery of a plant that cannot reproduce on its own

Corn is a familiar staple on our dinner tables. Yet this plant is said to have an extremely unusual structure compared with wild plants. Unlike dandelions, for example, it has no mechanism for dispersing its seeds. Its kernels remain firmly attached to the cob, while the entire ear is enclosed in husks, making it difficult for the seeds to disperse naturally even after they mature. Without humans to harvest and sow it, corn would have great difficulty continuing its lineage under natural conditions.

Because of its seemingly unnatural form—one that looks as though it was designed from the outset to be eaten by humans—some have even speculated that corn may have been a food crop given to ancient humans by aliens.

“I think that’s because humans selected and improved it to make it easier for us to use.”

So says Associate Professor Takayoshi Ishii of Tottori University, who focuses on research into cellular diversification through interspecific hybridization.

“Many wild plants shed their seeds once they flower and the fruit ripens. In other words, they drop their seeds onto the ground in an attempt to reproduce. But humans want to eat the fruit, and once the seeds fall away, we can’t eat it. So we selected plants whose fruit didn’t fall off, cultivated them, and continued improving them.”(Ishii, same below)

Corn, which was once said to have come from outer space, has also been shown through recent DNA research to have descended from a group of related wild grasses known as “teosinte.”

The process of improving corn is thought to have begun around 7,000 to 9,000 B.C. The earliest corn had very small kernels, but people repeatedly selected plants that produced larger ones and planted their seeds over thousands of years. The result was the corn we know today.

“Plants in the nightshade family contain toxins, but the tomatoes and eggplants we eat today come from plants whose edible parts contain very little toxin. That’s because we selected and cultivated strains with lower levels of toxins. Humans have improved plants in this way.”

Chinese cabbage × Cabbage = Hakuran

Crops have not been shaped solely through human selection. New varieties can also arise through natural hybridization. One example is bread wheat, the wheat used to make bread.

“Bread wheat was created through natural hybridization involving wild goatgrass (which looks like a grass) that likely grew in the same fields as a cultivated species closely related to durum wheat, which is used for pasta. Because it was highly useful to humans, it eventually came to be cultivated around the world.”

In general, crossing or hybridization involves breeding plants of the same species or variety to create new traits. Hybridization has been used to improve many crops, which is why we now see plants in an extraordinary range of shapes and colors.

In 1959, Sadawo Nishi developed “Hakuran,” a hybrid of Chinese cabbage and cabbage. Created using embryo culture to cultivate hybrid embryos, it was a pioneering success in producing an interspecific hybrid within the “Brassica genus.”

“With cabbage, we enjoy its crisp texture, whereas Chinese cabbage is often used in hot pots or made into kimchi, where we enjoy its softer texture. Hakuran looks like something between Chinese cabbage and cabbage. It’s delicious whether eaten raw, cooked, or pickled.”

There was also a variety called “Oretachi,” created by crossing oranges with trifoliate oranges.

“Generally, crossbreeding is done by artificially pollinating the stamens and pistils. But ‘Oretachi’ was created through cell fusion (somatic hybridization), using protoplasts—plant cells from oranges and trifoliate oranges whose cell walls had been removed. In grasses, it is possible to culture hybrid embryos and regenerate plants after distant hybridization, but somatic hybridization is extremely difficult.”

A new variety born in 2025 could help solve the food crisis

In 2025, a research group that included Associate Professor Ishii succeeded, for the first time in the world, in creating a wheat-corn hybrid by fusing selected numbers of egg cells and sperm cells from corn and wheat under a microscope. What kind of plant did they create?

“It looks like wheat. When the hybridization occurred, the nuclear genome derived from the corn was lost after fertilization. So visually, it looks like wheat. On the other hand, the mitochondrial genome, which functions in energy production and as an environmental sensor, became a hybrid genome containing both wheat and corn.”

When the researchers planted this wheat-corn hybrid, whose mitochondrial genome had become hybridized, in experimental fields at the Arid Land Research Center, they observed the following:

“Some of the plants grew larger, while others produced higher yields. There are concerns about food shortages caused by conflicts and extreme weather, but corn carries out C4 photosynthesis. Plants that use C4 photosynthesis have high water-use efficiency and photosynthetic efficiency, allowing them to produce greater yields with limited water and resources.

I hope that, through further breeding and improvement, we can eventually create wheat that possesses characteristics of corn. But this isn’t something that can be accomplished in just a few years. It could take decades, or it may not even happen within my lifetime. Even so, we have established a technology capable of creating something that has never existed before. I think it would be wonderful if we could enable interspecific hybridization between species adapted to a variety of environments around the world.”

Thousands of years ago, humans gradually transformed a plant called teosinte into the corn we know today. Now, with cutting-edge technology, scientists are attempting to create plants that have never existed before. Could they eventually produce something so extraordinary that it looks as though it really was brought here by aliens?

▼ Takayoshi Ishii — Associate Professor at Tottori University’s Arid Land Research and Education Center. Using cell-engineering and chromosome-engineering technologies, he develops crops that can withstand various stresses, including drought. In 2025, he and Professor Ryushi Okamoto of Tokyo Metropolitan University, Associate Professor Ryosuke Mega of Kobe University, and others successfully created a wheat–corn hybrid plant.