Abstract
Domestication involves changes in various traits of the phenotype in response to human selection. Diversification may accompany or follow domestication, and results in variants within the crop adapted to different uses by humans or different agronomic conditions. Similar domestication and diversification traits may be shared by closely related species (parallel evolution) or by distantly related species (convergent evolution). Many of these traits are produced by complex genetic networks or long biosynthetic pathways that are extensively conserved even in distantly related species. Similar phenotypic changes in different species may be controlled by homologous genes (parallel evolution at the genetic level) or non-homologous genes (convergent evolution at the genetic level). It has been suggested that parallel evolution may be more frequent among closely related species, or among diversification rather than domestication traits, or among traits produced by simple metabolic pathways. Crops domesticated in the Americas span a spectrum of genetic relatedness, have been domesticated for diverse purposes, and have responded to human selection by changes in many different traits, so provide examples of both parallel and convergent evolution at various levels. However, despite the current explosion in relevant information, data are still insufficient to provide quantitative or conclusive assessments of the relative roles of these two processes in domestication and diversification
Highlights
Domestication has been defined in various ways (e.g., Harris, 1989; Harlan, 1992; Clement, 1999; Benz, 2006; Fuller et al, 2010; Abbo et al, 2014; Larson et al, 2014), depending in part on the perspectives of the definer
Given that all flowering plants descend from a common ancestor, this may be considered as either parallel or convergent evolution, depending on whether dicotyledons and monocotyledons are regarded as closely related, because they are all flowering plants, or distantly related, because they belong to lineages that diverged early in the evolution of flowering plants
Parallel evolution implies that similar phenotypes are controlled by the same genes, whereas convergent evolution implies that similar phenotypes are controlled by genes that are not homologous
Summary
Retired from School of Biological Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom. Reviewed by: Vigouroux Yves, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), France Alessandro Alves-Pereira, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Evolutionary and Population Genetics, a section of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
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