Wild accessions maintained seed production over time.
Figure 3: Domestication and genetic diversity in elite and wild accessions of pearl millet.
We used a subset of 450,000 SNPs, with a missing rate <10% across PMiGAP lines and wild accessions.
(a) Principal component analysis of 376 pearl millet lines (345 PMiGAP lines and 31 wild accessions) using 450,000 high-quality SNPs.
The PCA analysis and phylogenetic tree showed four main clusters, three that contained wild accessions and one that grouped together the cultivated germplasm (Fig. 3a,b).
Single plants from each of 31 wild accessions sampling the Sahel from Senegal to Sudan were resequenced at an average 2× coverage using WGRS approach (Supplementary Table 22).
Wild accessions possessed a wide range of trait values (TR inflection points of 0.41 0.60; Supplementary Table 6), generally exceeding those of the cultivated comparators.
In this study, we compared the stem internode transcriptome of two bermudagrass wild accessions with extremely different tiller angles and stem growth directions.
Loci with higher levels of differentiation (most extreme FST) and stronger loss of diversity in the cultivated compared to the wild accessions were considered to be provisionally involved in the domestication process.
We also resequenced 994 pearl millet genotypes, including 963 inbred lines and single plants from each of 31 wild accessions, in order to understand the population structure, genetic diversity and domestication of this staple crop.
Wild accessions have numerous bristled spikes in the inflorescence and low seed density (i), and a plant architecture characterized by numerous basal and aerial branches (ii), with a plant height of around 1 m.
