RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Environment as a limiting factor of the historical global spread of mungbean JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2022.04.27.489711 DO 10.1101/2022.04.27.489711 A1 Pei-Wen Ong A1 Ya-Ping Lin A1 Hung-Wei Chen A1 Cheng-Yu Lo A1 Marina Burlyaeva A1 Thomas Noble A1 Ramakrishnan Nair A1 Roland Schafleitner A1 Margarita Vishnyakova A1 Eric Bishop-von-Wettberg A1 Maria Samsonova A1 Sergey Nuzhdin A1 Chau-Ti Ting A1 Cheng-Ruei Lee YR 2023 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/01/24/2022.04.27.489711.abstract AB While the domestication history has been investigated in many crops, the process of cultivation range expansion and factors governing this process received relatively little attention. Here using mungbean (Vigna radiata var. radiata) as a test case, we investigated the genomes of more than one thousand accessions to illustrate climatic adaptation’s role in dictating the unique routes of cultivation range expansion. Despite the geographical proximity between South and Central Asia, genetic evidence suggests mungbean cultivation first spread from South Asia to Southeast, East, and finally reached Central Asia. Combining evidence from demographic inference, climatic niche modeling, plant morphology, and records from ancient Chinese sources, we showed that the specific route was shaped by the unique combinations of climatic constraints and farmer practices across Asia, which imposed divergent selection favoring higher yield in the south but short-season and more drought-tolerant accessions in the north. Our results suggest that mungbean did not radiate from the domestication center as expected purely under human activity, but instead the spread of mungbean cultivation is highly constrained by climatic adaptation, echoing the idea that human commensals are more difficult to spread through the south-north axis of continents.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.