The taming of the weed: Developmental plasticity facilitated plant domestication.

Autor: Mueller NG; Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, United States of America., Horton ET; Rattlesnake Master LLC, Richmond, VA, United States of America., Belcher ME; Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, United States of America., Kistler L; Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, United States of America.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2023 Apr 07; Vol. 18 (4), pp. e0284136. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Apr 07 (Print Publication: 2023).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284136
Abstrakt: Our experiments with crop progenitors have demonstrated that these species exhibit dramatic plasticity in key traits that are affected by domestication, including seed and fruit morphology. These traits can be altered by cultivating crop progenitors for a single season, in the absence of any selection for domesticated phenotypes. We hypothesize that cultivation caused environmental shifts that led to immediate phenotypic changes in crop progenitors via developmental plasticity, similar to tameness in animals. Here we focus on the loss or reduction of germination inhibitors in an annual seed crop because seeds with high dormancy are undesirable in crops, and also present a serious barrier to selective pressures that arise from seed-saving and planting by humans. Data from four seasons of observation of the crop progenitor Polygonum erectum L. suggest that the low plant density conditions of an agroecosystem trigger a phenotypic response that reduces germination inhibitors, eliminating a key barrier to further selection. The timing of the harvest can also be used to manipulate the germinability of seed stock. These observations suggest that genetic assimilation may have played a role in the domestication of this plant. More experimental work with crop progenitors is needed to understand whether or not this phenomenon played a part in the domestication of other plants, and to accurately interpret the significance of ancient plant phenotypes in the archaeological record.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Mueller et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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