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The limits of selection during maize domestication

Nature volume 398, pages 236–239 (1999)Cite this article

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 05 April 2001

Abstract

The domestication of all major crop plants occurred during a brief period in human history about 10,000 years ago1. During this time, ancient agriculturalists selected seed of preferred forms and culled out seed of undesirable types to produce each subsequent generation. Consequently, favoured alleles at genes controlling traits of interest increased in frequency, ultimately reaching fixation. When selection is strong, domestication has the potential to drastically reduce genetic diversity in a crop. To understand the impact of selection during maize domestication, we examined nucleotide polymorphism in teosinte branched1, a gene involved in maize evolution2. Here we show that the effects of selection were limited to the gene's regulatory region and cannot be detected in the protein-coding region. Although selection was apparently strong, high rates of recombination and a prolonged domestication period probably limited its effects. Our results help to explain why maize is such a variable crop. They also suggest that maize domestication required hundreds of years, and confirm previous evidence that maize was domesticated from Balsas teosinte of southwestern Mexico.

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Figure 1: Predicted structure of teosinte branched1 (ref.25) and sliding-window analysis of polymorphism (π) in maize and teosinte.
Figure 2: Neighbour-joining trees for tb1 based on the 1,729-bp transcribed region (a) and the 1,143-bp 5′ non-transcribed reg.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Buckler, B. Gaut and J. Wendel for comments. This research was supported by the NSF and the Plant Molecular Genetics Institute of the University of Minnesota.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Biology, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota, 55108 , USA

    Rong-Lin Wang, Adrian Stec, Lewis Lukens & John Doebley

  2. Department of Genetics, Rutgers University, Piscataway, 08854-8082, New Jersey, USA

    Jody Hey

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  1. Rong-Lin Wang
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  2. Adrian Stec
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Correspondence to John Doebley.

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Wang, RL., Stec, A., Hey, J. et al. The limits of selection during maize domestication. Nature 398, 236–239 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/18435

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