Journal
MOLECULAR PHYLOGENETICS AND EVOLUTION
Volume 63, Issue 3, Pages 685-701Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.ympev.2012.02.006
Keywords
Solarium melongena; Scarlet eggplant; Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP); nuclear ribosomal Internal Transcribed Spacer (nrITS); Silk Road; Domestication
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The domestication history of eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) has long been debated, with studies unable to narrow down where domestication occurred within a broad region of tropical Asia. The most commonly hypothesized region is India, however China has an equally old written record of eggplant use dating ca. 2000 years before present. Both regions have a high diversity of landraces and populations of putatively wild eggplant: Solanum incanum L. in India and Solanum undatum Lam. in SE Asia. An additional complication is that there is taxonomic confusion regarding the two candidate progenitors. Here, we synthesize historic, morphologic, and molecular data (nrITS sequence and AFLP) to interpret the phylogeographic relationships among candidate progenitors and Asian eggplant landraces in order to test theories of domestication. A minimum of two domestication events is supported: one in India and one in southern China/SE Asia. Results also support separate domestication of S. melongena subsp. ovigerum, a group of morphologically distinct eggplants found in SE Asia, and suggest Asian S. incanum and S. undatum may not be genetically distinct. Routes of the spread of eggplant cultivation throughout Asia are proposed, and evolutionary relationships among allied species are discussed. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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