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

气候变化和人口快速增长给农作物生产带来了重大挑战。籽粒苋等营养价值较高的小作物有可能对未来的粮食安全作出贡献。一种作物要扩大到其原生范围之外，就需要迅速适应新的环境。为了了解适应是如何进行的，需要详细了解遗传多样性和适应特性。这种性状适应包括形态性状和内在性状，如植物离子组。最近一种作物在全球范围内的传播是理解适应新环境的理想模型。即使是像籽粒苋这样的小作物，在过去的数千年里也已经扩展到它们驯化的中心之外。在传播到世界各地之前，三种籽粒苋属植物在6000多年前在美洲被驯化，后来被引入印度。在过去的400年里，当地的地方品种已经适应了不同的印度气候。我们的初步结果表明，这三种籽粒苋属植物都有助于使作物适应新的环境。此外，适应良好的本地野生亲缘关系可能会为作物带来适应性遗传变异，并促进其定居。在这个项目中，我们将结合群体遗传学、数量遗传学和分子遗传学来了解作物在新环境中扩张的潜在遗传变化。我们将以籽粒苋引入印度作为近期作物扩张的模型，分析形态、离子和基因组信号，以了解使籽粒苋成功地在印度定居的适应性和适应性遗传变异的来源。此外，我们还旨在了解籽粒苋农艺和品质性状的分子基础。我们的目标是通过表达分析和基因组编辑来验证关键候选基因的功能。德国和印度的合作将作物育种研究与田间设施和离子学专业知识结合在一起，并结合进化基因组学、种群遗传学和分子专业知识。团队是解决拟议研究问题的理想团队。我们将在三个不同的环境中测试300个籽粒扬的加入，并使用全基因组测序来追踪适应性变异和定位原因基因，我们将从分子上验证这些基因。通过比较作物和当地野生近缘植物的遗传变异，将有助于阐明它们对印度苋菜地适应的贡献。通过这个合作项目，我们将有助于了解作物如何适应新的环境和适应的遗传变异来源。我们希望找出控制营养价值性状的基因，以便在未来提高作物质量和产量。

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