The extent of adaptive wild introgression in crops
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Genetics, Plant Science
- Keywords
- adaptation, domestication, gene flow, introgression, wild relatives
- Copyright
- © 2018 Janzen 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
- 2018. The extent of adaptive wild introgression in crops. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27031v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27031v1
Abstract
The study of crop evolution has focused primarily on the process of initial domestication. Post-domestication adaptation during the expansion of crops from their centers of origin has received considerably less attention. Recent research has revealed that, in at least some instances, crops have received introgression from their wild relatives that has facilitated adaptation to novel conditions encountered during expansion. Such adaptive introgression could bear importantly on the basic study of domestication, affecting estimates of several evolutionary processes of interest (e.g., the strength of the domestication bottleneck, the timing of domestication, the targets of selection during domestication). Identification of haplotypes introgressed from the wild may also aid the identification of alleles that are beneficial under particular environmental conditions. Here we review mounting evidence for substantial adaptive wild introgression in several crops and consider the implications of such gene flow to our understanding of crop histories.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. This manuscript is currently under review at a peer reviewed journal.