Abstract
Land plants are sessile organisms that cannot escape the adverse climatic conditions of a given environment. Hence, adaptation is one of the solutions to surviving in a challenging environment. This study was aimed at detecting adaptive loci in barley landraces that are affected by selection. To that end, a diverse population of barley landraces was analyzed using the genotyping by sequencing approach. Climatic data for altitude, rainfall and temperature were collected from 61 weather sites near the origin of selected landraces across Ethiopia. Population structure analysis revealed three groups whereas spatial analysis accounted significant similarities at shorter geographic distances (< 40 Km) among barley landraces. Partitioning the variance between climate variables and geographic distances indicated that climate variables accounted for most of the explainable genetic variation. Markers by climatic variables association analysis resulted in altogether 18 and 62 putative adaptive loci using Bayenv and latent factor mixed model (LFMM), respectively. Subsequent analysis of the associated SNPs revealed putative candidate genes for plant adaptation. This study highlights the presence of putative adaptive loci among barley landraces representing original gene pool of the farming communities.
Highlights
Natural selection is the key evolutionary process that generates the adaptation of plants to their environments (Andrews, 2010)
The sequence reads aligned with unique positions were subjected to single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) calling across the genotypes, founding 67,508 Hapmap SNPs
Though accessions from 10 geographic regions were analyzed, the population structure analysis detected that three subpopulations contained different regions as one group
Summary
Natural selection is the key evolutionary process that generates the adaptation of plants to their environments (Andrews, 2010). The best fitted alleles to the specific environment become prevalent through positive selection, which is the major driving force behind adaptive evolution in plants (Schaffner and Sabeti, 2008; Bose and Bartholomew, 2013). Genetic identification of those beneficial alleles is essential for answering fundamental questions concerning plant adaptive evolution as well as to utilize them in crop improvement. Advances in generation sequencing technologies have resulted in the development of newer methods of high-throughput genotyping such as genotyping by sequencing (GBS).
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