Exploring Wild Avocado Germplasm through Herbarium Genomes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The avocado has a complicated evolutionary history resulting from landscape-level management and domestication practices. Cultivars of the species are well-documented and categorized into three botanical races based on genetic differentiation, morphology, and adapted environment. However, we have very little knowledge of the avocado’s genetic variation purely in the wild. Previous efforts to explore its wild population structure have largely only included individuals collected from germplasm complexes, and thus represent a limited geographic scope and likely harbor a biased number of domestic variants. The main objectives of this study are to establish a genetic biogeography of wild avocado and compare whole-genome sequences of wild germplasm with that of modern cultivars. I will accomplish this through the extraction and analysis of recent historic (<60 yrs) genomes housed at various herbaria across the USA. These herbarium specimens were collected from probable wild locations representing the full geographic range of the species. With these sequences, I will identify novel wild genetic variants to establish the true wild population structure of the species, estimate levels of wild genetic diversity and crop-wild gene flow, and detect candidate genetic loci under domestication. This study will bolster archaeological studies of domestication origins and assist future breeding efforts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35703.0