DISES: Coevolutionary dynamics of humans and maize in the Americas

疾病：美洲人类和玉米的共同进化动态

• 批准号: 2307175
• 负责人: Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
• 金额: $ 159.97万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2026-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2307175&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DISES; Coevolutionary; dynamics; humans; maize

Corn, or maize, originated in the Americas but is now the most productive crop in the world, used for food, animal feed, fuel, and industrial manufacturing. Unlike some cultures that cultivated a broad array of staple crops, many indigenous peoples in the Americas relied primarily on maize. The survival and growth of many human populations and economies in the Americas was tied to the success of their maize crop, and many indigenous origin stories even posit that humans were literally created from maize. In turn, maize population growth and dispersal were dependent on human cultivation, and the modern maize form is the result of thousands of years of human selection for dietary, cultural, and economic needs. An interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists will synthesize publicly available data on humans and maize in the Americas and develop and apply novel analytical approaches to understand their entwined history. Previous studies of the relationship between humans and their domesticated plants and animals have been largely one-sided, but the approaches developed in this project will provide other researchers the tools to explicitly study the interactions driving such systems. These events occur and will be studied in the context of changing environments. Researchers will incorporate these interdisciplinary approaches into an educational video game for K-12 students that includes lessons on genetics, archaeology, and botany. The project will combine existing approaches with newly developed methodologies for co-estimating dispersal and demographic shifts to build co-evolutionary models and test specific a priori hypotheses about the evolution of humans and maize. Combining population genetics with archaeological data, researchers will reconstruct histories of admixture and population size change to how maize enabled human population and cultural change and how human movement and economic exchange patterned the dispersal of maize. Phylogenetic comparison of indigenous linguistic data to maize genetic data will further evaluate the impact of human culture and economy in patterning maize diversity, and researchers will use additional genetic, archaeological, and morphological data to test hypotheses about reciprocal cultural and genetic changes in each species.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

玉米原产于美洲，但现在是世界上产量最高的作物，用于食品、动物饲料、燃料和工业制造。与种植多种主要农作物的一些文化不同，美洲的许多土著民族主要依靠玉米。美洲许多人类人口和经济的生存和增长与他们的玉米作物的成功息息相关，许多土著故事甚至假设人类实际上是由玉米创造出来的。反过来，玉米种群的增长和扩散依赖于人类的耕作，而现代玉米的形式是数千年来人类出于饮食、文化和经济需求而选择的结果。一个由遗传学家和考古学家组成的跨学科团队将综合关于美洲人类和玉米的公开数据，并开发和应用新的分析方法来了解它们相互交织的历史。以前对人类与其驯养的动植物之间的关系的研究大多是片面的，但该项目中开发的方法将为其他研究人员提供工具，以明确研究驱动这种系统的相互作用。这些事件正在发生，并将在不断变化的环境中进行研究。研究人员将把这些跨学科的方法融入到一款面向K-12学生的教育视频游戏中，其中包括遗传学、考古学和植物学的课程。该项目将把现有的方法与新开发的共同估计扩散和人口变化的方法结合起来，以建立共同进化模型，并测试关于人类和玉米进化的特定先验假设。将种群遗传学与考古数据相结合，研究人员将重建混合和种群大小变化的历史，以了解玉米如何使人类人口和文化发生变化，以及人类运动和经济交换如何影响玉米的传播。原住民语言数据与玉米遗传数据的系统发育比较将进一步评估人类文化和经济对玉米多样性模式的影响，研究人员将使用额外的遗传、考古和形态数据来测试关于每个物种的相互文化和遗传变化的假设。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。