CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Plant domestication is a complex process in which natural and cultural factors play important roles delimiting evolutionary pathways of plants under cultivation. In order to deal with and understand the changes generated during this process multi-disciplinary research groups are required, mostly when a full picture of a taxon domestication history is to be assessed. We expose here advances in the study of C. maxima domestication from an integral perspective including experimental, morphometric and archaeobotanical approaches which are discussed in the light of new data from physiological analyses. Modern material includes plants obtained in experimental fields derived from crosses between domesticated (C. maxima subsp. maxima) and spontaneous/wildforms (C. maxima subsp. andreana), resulting in F1 and F2 generations. The archaeobotanical material includes remains recovered from sites in Southern Peru and Northwest Argentina ranging in date from 3000 to 800 BP. Morphological and anatomical analyses were conducted on seeds, pericarps and peduncles for reconstructing size and shape evolution under domestication. The results suggest the presence of hybrid forms, mainly in the earlier sites, but also in more recent ones. As expected, a linear evolutionary pathway was not found. Diversity and multiple crossings seem to have been a constant in squash cultivation over time, stressing the role of gene flows between domestic and wild variants in the domestication process. Finally we hypothesize the possible linkage between past gene flow and different dormancy patterns as part of management practices allowing the maintenance of squash populations adapted to different environmental conditions.

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