| Abstract Detail
Darwins' reversals: What we now know about Feralization and Crop Wild Relatives Husband, Brian [1], Cronin, Dane [2], Kron, Paul [2]. Feral Apples: origins and interactions with native congeners in southern Canada. Feral populations of crop species are prevalent on the landscape but factors regulating their formation and impacts on native congeners are poorly understood. In temperate N. America, and southern Canada in particular, domestic apple (Malus domestica) have established outside of cultivation and have expanded beyond commercial growing regions, in close proximity to native crabapples (Malus coronaria) and other naturalized ornamental apples. To better understand the impacts that feral populations have on native biodiversity, we examined the origins of feral apple populations and their propensity to hybridize with native congeners using microsatellite markers and flow cytometric seed screening. Our results indicate that feral populations show no admixture with native crabapple, suggesting that hybridization is not a critical step in feralization; however, a small proportion of trees are products of hybridization with the ornamental crabapple. Moreover, feral populations can be subdivided into 7 genetic subgroups, each associated with a distinct and limited set of domestic cultivars, and all of which are distributed uniformly throughout the range. Forty-two of 156 cultivars were implicated as progenitors of feral trees, but nine heritage varieties accounted for 72% of parental assignments. In addition, seed analysis indicates that hybridization between domestic apple and native crabapple is frequent (27% of seeds) and feral trees, rather than cultivars, are implicated as sires in most of the hybridization events. Our results suggest that the early stages in feralization in apple occur repeatedly from a subset of available cultivars, reflecting a bottleneck in association with commercial history and possibly selection on standing variation in this geographic area.
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1 - University Of Guelph, Integrative Biology, 50 Stone Road E, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada
2 - University of Guelph, Integrative Biology, 50 Stone Rd E, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada
Keywords:
none specified
Presentation Type: Colloquium Presentations
Session: C03, Darwins' reversals: What we now know about Feralization and Crop Wild Relatives
Location: /
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2021
Time: 12:45 PM(EDT)
Number: C03011
Abstract ID:514
Candidate for Awards:None |
