RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Largely unlinked gene sets targeted by selection for domestication syndrome phenotypes in maize and sorghum
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 184424
DO 10.1101/184424
A1 Xianjun Lai
A1 Lang Yan
A1 Yanli Lu
A1 James C. Schnable
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/04/184424.abstract
AB The domestication of diverse grain crops from wild grasses resulted from artificial selection for a suite of overlapping traits producing changes referred to in aggregate as ”domestication syndrome”. Parallel phenotypic change can be accomplished by either selection on orthologous genes, or selection on non-orthologous genes with parallel phenotypic effects. To determine how often artificial selection for domestication traits in the grasses targeted orthologous genes, we employed resequencing data from wild and domesticated accessions of Zea (maize) and Sorghum (sorghum). Many ”classic” domestication genes identified through QTL mapping in populations resulting from wild/domesticated crosses indeed show signatures of parallel selection in both maize and sorghum. However, the overall number of genes showing signatures of parallel selection in both species is not significantly different from that expected by chance. This suggests that, while a small number of genes will extremely large phenotypic effects have been targeted repeatedly by artificial selection during domestication, the optimization portion of domestication targeted small and largely non-overlapping subsets of all possible genes which could produce equivalent phenotypic alterations.