Thanks to Dr Brian Ford-Lloyd of the University of Birminghan in the UK for the following contribution.
A ground breaking publication in Nature Genetics points to the future for the genetic evaluation of crop wild relative germplasm. A group of Chinese scientists have used Illumina Next Generation Resequencing to produce whole genome sequences of 17 wild species of soybean. Only 17 wild species? But this is just the start for evaluating crop wild relatives on a completely different level than before — adding a different perspective to the analysis of genetic diversity, the identification of important adaptive differences between species, and locating novel allelic variation that can be used in crop improvement. One important result from the work is that they uncovered genetic variation in the wild species that has been clearly lost in cultivated material.
Luigi:
I haven’t seen the original paper yet (behind a pay wall) but I do wonder how they (or you) know that there is variation in the wild “that has been clearly lost in cultivated material”? Two alternatives quickly come to mind… first – that the variation was never present in or among cultivated (domesticated) material in the first place (and thus could not be lost)… and second – that the variation seen now might have come to exist following the domestication of the now cultivated types. Some records suggest Glycine has been domesticated for over 3 thousand years. While this isn’t an eternity, it is quite long enough for substantial change to accumulate – especially as one piece of the comparison (the cultigen) has clearly been under intense anthropomorphic selection.
I agree that this is a wonderful piece of work and very much worthy of our attention. I will further stipulate that there may well be plenty of value in the genetic diversity demonstrated in the wild type Glycines by these researchers. But I think it does a scientific disservice to editorialize that we have ‘clearly lost’ genetic diversity when there really isn’t any proof that it was ever there for the losing.