- The natural hybridization event occurred 9 million years ago.
- The growing delivered tomato and a kind of potato.
- Study analyzed the genomes of cultivated and wild potatoes.
The potato is one of the world’s food foods, he first cultivated thousands of years ago in the Andes Region of South America before spreading worldwide since the 16th century. But despite its importance for humanity, the evolutionary origins of potatoes have remained disconcerting, so far.
A new analysis of 450 cultivated potatoes genomes and 56 genome genomes of wild potatoes has revealed that the potato lineage originated through natural delivery between a wild tomato plant and a species similar to potatoes in South America about 9 million years ago.
This hybridization event led to the appearance of the nascent tuber of the potato plant, an enlarged structure that houses nutrients underground, according to the researchers, which also identified two crucial genes involved in the formation of the tuber. While in a tomato plant, the edible part is the fruit, in the potato plant, it is the tuber.
“Popes are really one of the most notable food basic foods of humanity, which combine extraordinary versatility, nutritional value and cultural ubiquity in the way in which few crops can match,” said Sanwen Huang, genome biologist and plant breeder at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the senior author of the study published on Friday on the magazine’s cell phone.
“People eat potatoes that use virtually all cooking methods: baking, roasting, boiling, vaporizing and frying. Despite being stereotyped as carbohydrates, potatoes offer vitamin C, potassium, fiber and resistant starch, and are naturally free of gluten, low and slateing, a source of dense calories of nutrients,” Huang added.
Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrates that resists digestion in the small intestine and ferments in the large intestine, feeding beneficial bacteria in the intestine.
The scientific name of the modern potato plant is Solanum tuberosum. Their two parents identified in the study were plants that were the ancestors of a species similar to the potato that are now in Peru called Etuberosum, which looks a lot like the potato plant but lacks a tuber and the tomato plant.
These two plants themselves shared a common ancestor that lived about 14 million years ago, and could be naturally intersected when the fortuitous hybridization event occurred five million years after they had separated from each other.
“This event led to a reorganization of genes in such a way that the new lineage produced tubers, allowing these plants to expand to cold and dry habitats recently created in the growing mountain chain of the Andes,” said Botanist Sandra Knapp of the Natural History Museum of London, co -author of the study.
This hybridization event coincided with the rapid elevation of the Andes. With a tuber, the potato plant was able to adapt to the changing regional environment and prosper in the harsh conditions of the mountains.
“The tubers can store nutrients for cold adaptation and allow asexual reproduction to face the challenge of reduced fertility in cold conditions. These allowed the plant to survive and expand quickly,” Huang said.
Study findings, according to researchers, can help guide a better cultivated potato creation to address the environmental challenges that crops are currently facing factors such as climate change.
There are currently approximately 5,000 potato varieties. The potato is the third most important food crop in the world, after rice and wheat, for human consumption, according to the International Research Organization of the Potato Center of Peru. China is the main producer of world potatoes.
“It is always difficult to eliminate all harmful mutations in potato’s genomes in reproduction, and this study opens a new door for a harmful mutations -free potatoes using tomato as the chassis of synthetic biology,” Huang said.
The study can also open the door to generate a new species of crop that could produce tomato fruits on the ground and potato tubers under the ground, according to Zhiyang Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of China.
Potato and tomato are members of the Nightshade family of flowers with flowers that also includes tobacco and peppers, among others. The study did not investigate the evolutionary origins of other crops of tuber roots that originated in South America, such as sweet potato and cassava, which are members of different families of flowers with flowers.
While the parts of the tomato and potato plants that people eat are quite different, the plants themselves are very similar.
“We use different parts of these two species, fruits in tomatoes and tubers in potatoes,” Knapp said. “If you look at the flowers or leaves, they are very similar. And if you are lucky enough to let your potatoes produce fruits, they look like small green tomatoes. But they don’t eat them. They are not very pleasant.”
