Domestication and breeding have influenced the genetic structure of plant populations due to selection for adaptation from natural habitats to agro-ecosystems. Here, we investigate the effects of selection on the contents of 51 primary kernel metabolites and their relationships in three Triticum turgidum L. subspecies (i.e., wild emmer, emmer, durum wheat) that represent the major steps of tetr...

The domestication of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) from its wild ancestor (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) led to a loss of genetic diversity both through a population bottleneck and through directional selection at agronomically important genes. In order to discriminate between those effects and to investigate the nature of the domestication bottleneck, we analyzed nucleotide diversity data from 12 ch...

Understanding the genetic structure of domestic species provides a window into the process of domestication and motivates the design of studies aimed at making links between genotype and phenotype. Rabbits exhibit exceptional phenotypic diversity, are of great commercial value, and serve as important animal models in biomedical research. Here, we provide the first comprehensive survey of nucleo...

Over the past several years, our understanding of plant domestication has advanced substantially at the gene and genome levels. This is due largely to the rapid accumulation of genomic resources that provided genome-wide markers for population and molecular genetic analyses of crops and their wild relatives. A number of recent reviews captured some general aspects of these advances (Doebley et ...

Recent decades have witnessed the rapid expansion of interest in and research on the domestication of crop plants worldwide. These species are the basis of the rise to dominance of Homo sapiens over the last 10,000 years. New techniques in archaeology and the expansion of molecular genetics are uncovering abundant evidence to support or refute old hypotheses about human domestication of crops a...

The process of domestication has led to dramatic morphological and physiological changes in crop species due to adaptation to cultivation and to the needs of farmers. To investigate the phenotypic architecture of shoot- and root-related traits and quantify the impact of primary and secondary domestication, we examined a collection of 36 wheat genotypes under optimal and nitrogen-starvation cond...

The dramatic phenotypic changes that occur in organisms during domestication leave indelible imprints on their genomes. Although many domesticated plants and animals have been systematically compared with their wild genetic stocks, the molecular and genomic processes underlying fungal domestication have received less attention. Here, we present a nearly complete genome assembly for the recently...

We gathered genomic data from grapes (Vitis vinifera ssp. vinifera), a clonally propagated perennial crop, to address three ongoing mysteries about plant domestication. The first is the duration of domestication; archaeological evidence suggests that domestication occurs over millennia, but genetic evidence indicates that it can occur rapidly. We estimated that our wild and cultivated grape sam...

Domestication studies traditionally focus on the differences in morphological characteristics between wild and domesticated populations that are under direct selection, the components of the domestication syndrome. Here, we consider that other aspects can be modified, because of the interdependence between plant characteristics and the forces of natural selection. We investigated the ongoing do...

Pigs are one of the earliest domesticated livestock species, first at least 10,000 years ago. The domestication wild boar, including associated morphological changes, is a long process over several millennia. Across Southwest Asia, management, domestication, and adaption different species was highly localized process, influenced by both cultural environmental factors. This paper explores size, ...