The genetic control of morphological and ionomic adaptation during the colonisation of India by grain amaranth

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Changing climate and rapid population growth pose major challenges to crop production. Minor crops with high nutritional values, such as grain amaranth have the potential to contribute to future food security. The expansion of a crop beyond its native range requires rapid adaptation to the new environment. To understand how adaptation proceeds, detailed knowledge about the genetic diversity and adaptive traits is required. Such trait adaptation includes morphological traits and intrinsic traits such as the plant ionome. The recent spread of a crop across the globe is an ideal model to understand adaptation to new environments.Even minor crops like grain amaranth have spread outside their center of domestication over the last millennia. Before spreading around the world, three grain amaranth species were domesticated over 6000 years ago in the Americas and were later introduced to India. Within the last 400 years local landraces have adapted to distinct Indian climates. Our preliminary results suggest that all three grain amaranth species have contributed to adapt the crop to their new environment. In addition, well adapted native wild relatives potentially contributed adaptive genetic variation to the crop and facilitated the colonization. In this project we will combine population, quantitative and molecular genetics to understand the underlying genetic changes of crop expansion to new environments.Using the introduction of amaranth to India as a model of recent crop expansion, we will analyze morphological, ionomic and genomic signals to understand the adaptations and the sources of adaptive genetic variation that allowed grain amaranth to successfully colonize India. In addition, we aim to understand the molecular basis of agronomic and quality traits of grain amaranth. We aim to validate the function of key candidate genes through expression analysis and genome editing.The German-Indian collaboration brings together crop breeding research with field facilities and expertise in ionomics, with the evolutionary genomics, population genetics and molecular expertise.The team is ideal to address the proposed research questions. We will test 300 grain amaranth accession in three different environments and employ whole genome sequencing to trace adaptive variation and map causal genes that we will molecularly validate. The comparison of genetic variation of the crop and native wild relatives will allow to elucidate their contribution to the adaptation of Indian amaranth landraces.Through this collaborative project, we will help to understand how crops adapt to new environment and the sources of genetic variation for adaptation. We hope to identify genes regulating traits of nutritional value that allow to improve crop quality and production in the future