An international team of researchers have sequenced the complete genome for einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum).
- Einkorn wheat is the world’s first domesticated crop and traced its evolutionary history.
- The new reference genome and evolutionary history are published in the journal Nature.
- Farmed as early as 12,000 years ago, einkorn wheat is believed to be the first crop grown by humans.
- As agriculture spread around the world, people replaced einkorn with bread wheat, which they selectively cultivated for traits like large grain size and easy threshing.
- Over centuries of intensive cultivation and selection, bread wheat lost its natural resistance to drought, heat and pests — properties that would make it resilient to current threats from climate change.
- However, einkorn wheat has not undergone such intense selective breeding, which means it maintains many of its resilient properties. Unlike bread wheat, both wild and domesticated varieties of einkorn still exist.
- By comparing the einkorn genome with the genome of bread wheat, which was successfully sequenced in 2018, researchers can now look for mismatches, narrowing down the potential targets for genetic traits that differ between the ancient and modern wheat grains.
- The study demonstrated that einkorn can be used to map traits in bread wheat by showing that the gene for influencing the number of shoots a plant sends up from its base is the same gene in both grains.
- The researchers found einkorn has been hybridized many times since its initial domestication and dispersal throughout Europe and Central Asia.
- A detailed analysis of the genome could inform anthropological studies of human migration and settlement.
