Resumen de la plática

Maize domestication is one of the most extreme examples of human-driven selection.

Originating from a grass native to Mesoamerica around ten thousand years ago, maize underwent significant morphological transformations that obscured its origins for nearly a decade.

Understanding the dispersion routes, admixture patterns, and the sequence of changes that led tomaize becoming one of the most human-adapted crops remains a central question in plant evolution.

Ancient genomes have been instrumental in testing hypotheses about dispersal routes and admixture, and they provide a direct means to determine the timing of selection for domestication-related traits. In my talk, I will present some of our recent work reconstructing the history of maize domestication by studying ancient maize genomes spanning different stages of domestication. In particular, I will discuss what we have learned about maize’s dispersal routes north and south from its domestication center in Mexico, the emerging timeline of selection during domestication, and what these findings reveal about the culinary preferences of early farmers in the Americas.

Jazmín Ramos Madrigal. Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

https://globe.ku.dk/research/hologenomics/plant-palaeogenomics-group/

https://globe.ku.dk/staff-list/?pure=en/persons/502736

Frontiers in Genomics