If increasing levels of the three NPQ recovery proteins boosts total productivity , why hasn ' t natural selection or postdomestication seed selection done this already ? Perhaps we ' re looking at an effect specific to plants transplanted to sunshade environments far from their wild precursors . I ' ve internet searched for the native habitat of Nicotiana rustica , the wild precursor to the tobacco plants used in the study , and it seems like it may have originally been an forest undergrowth plant , a habitat that wouldn ' t benefit from rapid adjustments to sunshade . Now that its a row crop , it benefits more from NPQ recovery proteins . If that ' s the case , then I ' d hope for yield improvements for many legumes with undergrowth wild precursors from this technique with these genes , but not much for cereal grains derived from grasses .