A test of ecological and ethnolinguistic determinants of maize diversity in southern Mexico

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1 Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, UNAM, Morelia, Michoacán, México
2 Colegio de Postgraduados, Montecillo, Texcoco, Estado de México, México
3 Department of Plant Sciences, Center for Population Biology, and Genome Center, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States
4 Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1192v2
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Agricultural Science, Biodiversity, Genetics
Keywords
Population Structure, Maize Diversity, Genetic Diversity, Mexico-Southern, Crop Diversity, Indigenous People, 35 Mexico-Southern
Copyright
© 2015 Orozco-Ramírez et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Orozco-Ramírez Q, Santacruz-Varela A, Ross-Ibarra J, Brush SB. 2015. A test of ecological and ethnolinguistic determinants of maize diversity in southern Mexico. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1192v2

Abstract

While prevailing theories of crop evolution suggest that crop diversity and cultural diversity should be linked, empirical evidence for such a link remains inconclusive. In particular, few studies have investigated such patterns on a local scale. Here, we address this issue by examining the determinants of maize diversity in a local region of high cultural and biological richness in Southern Mexico. We collected maize samples from villages at low and mid elevations in two adjacent municipalities of differing ethnicity: Mixtec or Chatino. Although morphological traits show few patterns of population structure, we see clear genetic differentiation among villages, with municipality explaining a larger proportion of the differentiation than altitude. Consistent with an important role of social origin in patterning seed exchange, metapopulation model-based estimates of differentiation match the genetic data within village and ethnically distinct municipalities, but underestimate differentiation when all four villages are taken together. Our research provides insights about the importance of social origin in structuring maize diversity at the local scale.

Author Comment

Revisions to manuscript after peer review.