Evolutionary and food supply implications of ongoing maize domestication by Mexican campesinos

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
Mauricio R BellonJosé Sarukhán

Abstract

Maize evolution under domestication is a process that continues today. Case studies suggest that Mexican smallholder family farmers, known as campesinos, contribute importantly to this, but their significance has not been explicitly quantified and analysed as a whole. Here, we examine the evolutionary and food security implications of the scale and scope under which campesinos produce maize. We gathered official municipal-level data on maize production under rainfed conditions and identified campesino agriculture as occurring in municipalities with average yields of less than or equal to 3 t ha-1 Environmental conditions vary widely in those municipalities and are associated with a great diversity of maize races, representing 85.3% of native maize samples collected in the country. We estimate that in those municipalities, around 1.38 × 1011 genetically different individual plants are subjected to evolution under domestication each season. This implies that 5.24 × 108 mother plants contribute to the next generation with their standing genetic diversity and rare alleles. Such a large breeding population size also increases the total number of adaptive mutations that may appear and be selected for. We also estimate that campesino ...Continue Reading

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Citations

Oct 2, 2019·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Idalia C Rojas-BarreraDaniel Piñero
Feb 20, 2020·Genetics·Raul TorresJeffrey Ross-Ibarra
May 30, 2020·G3 : Genes - Genomes - Genetics·Leo ZeitlerMarkus G Stetter
Aug 10, 2021·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·W L SilverA R Jones
Sep 14, 2021·The New Phytologist·Colin K KhouryImke Thormann

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