Abstract
Maize is an excellent model for the study of plant adaptation. Indeed, post domestication maize quickly adapted to a host of new environments across the globe. And work over the last decade has begun to highlight the role of the wild relatives of maize-the teosintes Zea mays ssp. parviglumis and ssp. mexicana-as excellent models for dissecting long-term local adaptation.Although human-driven selection associated with maize domestication has been extensively studied, the genetic basis of natural variation is still poorly understood. Here we review studies on the genetic basis of adaptation and plasticity in maize and its wild relatives. We highlight a range of different processes that contribute to adaptation and discuss evidence from natural, cultivated, and experimental populations. From an applied perspective, understanding the genetic bases of adaptation and the contribution of plasticity will provide us with new tools to both better understand and mitigate the effect of climate changes on natural and cultivated populations.
Highlights
A combination of archeobotanical records and genetic data has established that maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) was domesticated around 9000 years ago in the Balsas river valley of Mexico from the wild teosinte Zea mays ssp. parviglumis [1–3]
Today the maize gene pool worldwide consists of locally adapted open-pollinated populations as well as modern inbred lines, derived from landraces, that are used in hybrid production for modern breeding
Aguirre-Liguori et al [98] showed that both within parviglumis and mexicana, populations distributed at the edge of the ecological niche experience stronger local adaptation, suggesting that local adaptation may have contributed to divergence between these two subspecies
Summary
A combination of archeobotanical records and genetic data has established that maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) was domesticated around 9000 years ago in the Balsas river valley of Mexico from the wild teosinte Zea mays ssp. parviglumis [1–3]. Today the maize gene pool worldwide consists of locally adapted open-pollinated populations (landraces) as well as modern inbred lines, derived from landraces, that are used in hybrid production for modern breeding Such spatial movement has exerted a diversity of selective pressures, triggering changes in the phenology of individuals that determines the completion of the annual cycle and individual fitness [17, 18]. Migration is somewhat limited by the complex landscape of Mexico [20, 21] Both teosinte taxa display a high level of nucleotide diversity [22] consistent with large estimates of effective population sizes from 120k to 160k [23]. Likewise, rising temperatures have likely caused the upslope migration reported for vascular plants species across European boreal-to-temperate mountains [25] Such measurement in natural populations of teosintes are currently unavailable making the assessment of recent migration in response to climate change unknown. We discuss the role genetic convergence and phenotypic plasticity have played during adaptation
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