Abstract
In the second half of the last century, the American dent hybrids began to be widely grown, leading to the disappearance or marginalization of the less productive traditional varieties. Nowadays the characterization of traditional landraces can help breeders to discover precious alleles that could be useful for modern genetic improvement and allow a correct conservation of these open pollinated varieties (opvs). In this work we characterized the ancient coloured cultivar “Millo Corvo” typical of the Spanish region of Galicia. We showed that this cultivar accumulates high amounts of anthocyanins (83.4 mg/100g flour), and by TLC (Thin Layer Chromatography) and HPLC (High Pressure Liquid Chromatography) analysis, we demonstrated that they mainly consisted of cyanidin. Mapping and sequencing data demonstrate that anthocyanin pigmentation is due to the presence of the red color1 gene(r1), a transcription factor driving the accumulation of this pigment in the aleurone layer. Further chemical analysis showed that the kernels are lacking in carotenoids, as confirmed by genetic study. Finally a DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) radical scavenging ability test showed that Millo Corvo, even though lacking carotenoids, has a high antioxidant ability, and could be considered as a functional food due to the presence of anthocyanins.
Highlights
The beginning of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) domestication has been dated to around 8700 years before the present in Mexico [1,2,3,4]
The institutions and the companies responsible for conducting maize genetic improvement are starting to study the ancient landraces across the continents with the aim of identifying and using novel alleles and haplotypes in a context of low input and sustainable agriculture [38]
It is well known that red/black coloration of maize kernels is due to the accumulation of flavonoids and in particular anthocyanins [39] and with the aim to quantify this pigment a spectrophotometric quantification of the main class of molecules was performed
Summary
The beginning of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) domestication has been dated to around 8700 years before the present in Mexico [1,2,3,4]. Characterization of an Ancient European Flint Maize for the adaptation of maize to Europe The hybridization of these different corn sources, together with the effects of photoperiod, temperature, humidity and altitude of the different environments allowed the constitution and the differentiation of local European varieties and landraces [13,14]. Hundreds of new landraces have been created in the past 500 years [5, 15] During this process the farmers’ work of selection, based on specific needs for use and cultivation has been important too: they maintained the landraces as open pollinated populations, creating a collection of corn plants with high heterozygosity and heterogeneity, which represented a very important source of variability and of alleles with high adaptation to the local environments. In recent years, renewed interest for the ancient cultivars has been increasing due to the new vision of agricultural systems based on yield performance and on sustainability and the quality of the products
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