It has been part of our daily lives for generations, but retains many secrets. The potato, whose evidence of consumption by humans date back 10,000 years in South America, still feeds controversies on the conditions of its appearance and its domestication. Also, the discovery of an international team of researchers, published on July 31 in the American Biology Review Cellbrings an important and amazing piece to the puzzle of its history: the potato descends from the tomato!
Biologists, geneticists, computer scientists and statisticians have joined this vast study to go back in time and try to draw the phylogenetic tree of cultivated potato species. But the team was particularly interested in Petotaa line of wild tuberculum plants to which the potato is related. It is part of the big family of Solanaceae, to which the potatoes and tomatoes belong.
“Cultivated potatoes, although precious, are genetically uniform due to artificial selection. We have therefore chosen a wild plant for our study, because it offers a more diverse genetic heritage and allows us to observe natural evolutionary processes without the influence of selection by man ”is justified Zhiyang Zhang, researcher at the Institut de Génomique Agricole de Shenzhen (Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences), the first signatory of the study.
The genome analysis of 128 specimens of Petota taken from its natural biotopes on the American continent has revealed that it is “Of ancient hybrid origin, all its members with stable mixed genomic ancestry, derived from lines trance and tomatoes about 8 to 9 million years ago ”write researchers in their article.
A rare event
Akuberosum, Present in southern Chile, has leaves that resemble those of potatoes and underground organs capable of repelling. But these are rhizomes, underground stems, no tubers. The tomato, which is no longer to be presented, has about fifteen wild species, exclusively visible in South America and Central America.
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