Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben, Seeland, Germany.
The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Plant J. 2022 Aug;111(3):849-858. doi: 10.1111/tpj.15861. Epub 2022 Jun 23.
Crop-wild gene flow is common when domesticated plants and their wild relatives grow close to each other. The resultant hybrid forms appear as semi-domesticates and were sometimes considered as missing links between crops and their wild progenitors. Wild-growing barleys in Central and Eastern Asia, named Hordeum agriocrithon, show hallmark characters of both wild and domesticated forms. Their spikes disintegrate at maturity to disperse without human intervention, but bear lateral grains, which were favored by early farmers and are absent from other wild barleys. As an intermediate form, H. agriocrithon has been proposed several times as a progenitor of domesticated barley. Here, we used genome-wide marker data and whole-genome resequencing to show that all H. agriocrithon accessions of a major germplasm collection are hybrid forms that arose multiple times by admixture of diverse domesticated and wild populations. Although H. agriocrithon barleys have not played a special role in barley domestication, future analysis of the adaptative potential of bi-directional crop-wild gene flow in extant barleys may prove a fertile research field.
当栽培植物与其野生亲缘种生长在一起时，作物-野生基因流是很常见的。由此产生的杂种形式表现为半驯化种，有时被认为是作物与其野生祖先之间缺失的环节。在中亚和东亚野生生长的大麦，名为 Hordeum agriocrithon，表现出野生和驯化形式的显著特征。它们的穗在成熟时解体，无需人为干预即可分散，但带有侧粒，这是早期农民所青睐的，而其他野生大麦则没有。作为一种中间形式，H. agriocrithon 曾多次被提议作为驯化大麦的祖先。在这里，我们使用全基因组标记数据和全基因组重测序来表明，主要种质资源收集的所有 H. agriocrithon 品系都是由不同的驯化和野生群体混合多次产生的杂种形式。尽管 H. agriocrithon 大麦在大麦驯化过程中没有发挥特殊作用，但对现存大麦中双向作物-野生基因流的适应潜力的未来分析可能证明是一个富有成效的研究领域。
