Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Jeremy recently mused about the possibility of reconstructing the cultivated peanut. As coincidence would have it, a brace of papers just out look at the same thing for a couple of other crops.

A team from the US, Canada and Turkey describe in Euphytica how they reconstructed the modern cultivated dessert strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) by crossing F. virginiana and F. chiloensis. That’s what happened in the 18th century in some gardens in Britanny once the Chilean strawberry, cultivated for a thousand years by the Mapuche, found its way there after its introduction to Europe by the French spy, Captain Amédée-François Frézier, and met the wild Virginia strawberry. That had started replacing the local cultivated F. vesca in European gardens up to a century before. The researchers were able to come up with significantly better varieties of dessert strawberry by being careful to choose a wider range of elite, complementary genotypes as parents.

And over at GRACE, Iranian and Japanese researchers looked for areas where cultivated tetraploid (durum) wheat is found together with the other putative parent of bread wheat, i.e. wild/weedy Aegilops tauschii. They found the two species in close proximity in two districts in the central Alborz Mountains. So, the “association hypothesized in the theory of bread wheat evolution staill exists in the area where bread wheat probably originated.” The paper does not report finding any natural hybrids, but it does suggest that further field studies should be undertaken, presumably to look for evidence of such introgression.