bioRxivJClub
Contrasting genomic routes to domestication in Occidental and Oriental pears
bioRxiv · · Preprint · Open access
NIE, Chen + 24 more
Abstract ↗AI summary
The abstract is read at the publisher; the summary is JClub's.
Across 396 wild and cultivated pear individuals spanning Europe and East Asia, domestication shows weak bottlenecks and extensive wild-crop gene flow, indicating a protracted evolutionary process.
- Why it matters: Domestication genomics in perennial fruit trees is not well integrated across demography, selection, and structural variation, limiting how alternative evolutionary routes are compared.
- What they did: Using lineage-specific reference genomes, the study analyzed nucleotide and transposable element polymorphisms in 396 well-documented individuals from both regions, including selection scans and deleterious-mutation burden tests.
- The result: Europe shows independent divergence of dessert and perry Pyrus communis, while East Asia shows geographic diversification of Pyrus pyrifolia; cultivated pears have a lower realized burden of deleterious mutations, and TE insertion patterns reflect demography rather than selection.
The findingWhy it mattersWhat they didThe result
- Open access
- 1 cites