Data from: Teosinte in Europe – searching for the origin of a novel weed

A novel weed has recently emerged, causing serious agronomic damage in one of the most important maize-growing regions of Western Europe, the Northern Provinces of Spain. The weed has morphological similarities to a wild relative of maize and has generally been referred to as teosinte. However, the identity, origin or genetic composition of ‘Spanish teosinte’ was unknown. Here, we present a genome-wide analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data for Spanish teosinte, sympatric populations of cultivated maize and samples of reference teosinte taxa. Our data are complemented with previously published SNP datasets of cultivated maize and two Mexican teosinte subspecies. Our analyses reveal that Spanish teosinte does not group with any of the currently recognized teosinte taxa. Based on Bayesian clustering analysis and hybridization simulations, we infer that Spanish teosinte is of admixed origin, most likely involving Zea mays ssp. mexicana as one parental taxon, and an unidentified cultivated maize variety as the other. Analyses of plants grown from seeds collected in Spanish maize fields and experimental crosses under controlled conditions reveal that hybridization does occur between Spanish teosinte and cultivated maize in Spain, and that current hybridization is asymmetric, favouring the introgression of Spanish teosinte into cultivated maize, rather than vice versa

Ancient plant DNA in archaeobotany

Holozän - aDNA - Archäobotanik - Makroreste - Genetik - Getreide - Früchte - Holz - Methode - Kulturpflanzen - Vegetationsgeschichte - Ernährun

Population genomics of crop domestication : current state and perspectives

Genomics has enabled access to unprecedented amounts of genomic and transcriptomic data. Studies of crop domestication have benefited from these datasets for deeper insights into when, where, and how crops were domesticated. Although genomics makes it possible to answer such questions, it also creates new technical and methodological challenges. Such large genomic and transcriptomic datasets provide the opportunity to advance from descriptive to hypothesis testing studies. Several model-based methods are now available to test hypotheses and to trace the history of crops. Studies of gene expression and of ancient DNA are new very active fields which hold great promise. Here, we review some key questions concerning crop domestication and discuss how genomics can help answer these questions and what interesting new approaches could be used in the future. As genomics data continue to become available, domestication studies will advance our knowledge not only of well-known domestication models, such as rice and maize, but also of other currently less widely studied crops. We will then be able to test general hypotheses associated with domestication across species