Cultivated strawberries (Fragaria × ananassa) are octoploid, possessing eight copies of chromosomes, a complexity arising from allopolyploidy, a process involving hybridization between different species. Researchers at Portland State University utilized long terminal repeat retrotransposons, a type of repeating DNA, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the strawberry genome. Their findings, published in Horticulture Research, revealed that the strawberry's genome consists of four distinct subgenomes and underwent three separate hybridization events approximately 3 to 4 million, 2 to 3 million, and 1 to 2 million years ago. This novel method of analyzing transposable elements as "evolutionary time stamps" offers significant implications for agriculture and plant breeding, with researchers planning to apply it to other polyploid crops like wheat, sugarcane, and cotton.