Historic manioc genomes illuminate maintenance of diversity under long-lived clonal cultivation.
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Kistler L, de Oliveira Freitas F, Gutaker RM, Maezumi SY, Ramos-Madrigal J, Simon MF, Mendoza F JM, Drovetski SV, Loiselle H, de Oliveira EJ, Vieira EA, Carvalho LJCB, Ellis Perez M, Lin AT, Liu HL, Miller R, Przelomska NAS, Ratan A, Wales N, Wann K, Zhang S, García M, Valenzuela D, Rothhammer F, Santoro CM, Domic AI, Capriles JM, Allaby RG
Science 387 (6738) eadq0018 [2025-03-07; online 2025-03-07]
Manioc-also called cassava and yuca-is among the world's most important crops, originating in South America in the early Holocene. Domestication for its starchy roots involved a near-total shift from sexual to clonal propagation, and almost all manioc worldwide is now grown from stem cuttings. In this work, we analyze 573 new and published genomes, focusing on traditional varieties from the Americas and wild relatives from herbaria, to reveal the effects of this shift to clonality. We observe kinship over large distances, maintenance of high genetic diversity, intergenerational heterozygosity enrichment, and genomic mosaics of identity-by-descent haploblocks that connect all manioc worldwide. Interviews with Indigenous traditional farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado illuminate how traditional management strategies for sustaining, diversifying, and sharing the gene pool have shaped manioc diversity.
PubMed 40048537
DOI 10.1126/science.adq0018
Crossref 10.1126/science.adq0018