Phylogenetic inferences in New World-Native Chenopodium allotetraploids from intron 16A sequence data of the salt Overly Sensitive 1 gen

TESTER, M; BERTERO, D; MCLAUGHLIN, M; FUENTES, F; JARVIS, D. E.; MAUGHAN, P. J.; CURTI, R.; JELLEN, E. N.; O'BRIEN, J

San Diego

Conferencia; Plant & Animal Genome Conference XXVI; 2018

PAG

The goosefoot genus (Chenopodium) is circumpolar in distribution, with taxa native to all of the major continents as well as distant archipelago-endemics. The most famous species are C. quinoa or quinoa, the highly nutritious seed crop from the Andean region, and C. album or lambsquarters, a notoriously invasive agricultural weed. Quinoa is an allotetraploid (2n = 36) composed of an AA subgenome that originated in the Western Hemisphere and a BB subgenome commonly found in Eurasian diploids and hexaploid C. album. Quinoa is part of a complex of wild, weedy, and cultivated taxa sharing this AABB genome formula and that are native to North and/or South America. This complex includes weedy North American C. berlandieri or pitseed goosefoot; weedy South American C. hircinum or avian goosefoot; and Mexican seed (chia roja), and vegetable (huauzontle and quelite) domesticates classified as C. berlandieri ssp. nuttaliae. Currently, we are using DNA sequence information from intron 16A of the Salt Overly Sensitive I (SOSI) gene to help clarify relationships among these New World allotetraploids. Our primary objective is to better define the primary gene pool for improving the adaptive characteristics of domesticated quinoa so it can be widely cultivated in lowland environments. Phylogenetic data indicate that the South American taxa fit within a larger clade that includes C. berlandieri belonging to the northern Gulf of Mexico coastal ecotype (var. boscianum), thus supporting a hypothesis of long-range dispersal to South America of the wild/weedy ancestor that was later domesticated as C. quinoa.