Close genetic relationship between cultivated and natural populations of common buckwheat in the Sanjiang area is not due to recent gene flow between them-An analysis using microsatellite markers.

Natural populations of wild common buckwheat have been found growing adjacent to cultivated populations of common buckwheat. Gene flow between the cultivated and natural populations would be expected in such cases. To evaluate the amount of gene flow, two sets composed of a cultivated buckwheat population and an adjacent natural population of wild common buckwheat were chosen, one from Yanjing village in the Sanjiang area, which is presumed to be the original birthplace of common buckwheat, and one from Jinhe village, Yanyuan district of Sichuan province in China. The genotypes of 45 individuals from each population were examined at eight microsatellite marker loci to estimate the magnitude of gene flow between the cultivated and wild common buckwheat populations. The Bayesian method with a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach estimated that the magnitude of gene flow between the populations in the Sanjiang area at 0.002-0.008 was not significantly different from that found in Yanyuan district at 0.002-0.008. The gene flow between cultivated populations was higher, usually at 0.002-0.044 (exceptionally high at 0.255 between cultivated populations of Yanjing and Jinhe), than that found between a cultivated population and a natural population (0.002-0.008) or between two natural populations (0.002-0.003). Therefore, the genetic similarity found between the cultivated populations and natural populations observed in the Sanjiang area (Konishi et al., 2005) was not due to recent gene flow between them. This in turn suggests that the close genetic relationship found in the Sanjiang area may be due to the common ancestry of the natural populations and cultivated common buckwheat.

Original birthplace of cultivated common buckwheat inferred from genetic relationships among cultivated populations and natural populations of wild common buckwheat revealed by AFLP analysis.

The genetic relationships among seven cultivated populations and eight natural populations of wild common buckwheat were analyzed using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). The genetic distance was estimated for each pair of the 15 populations based on the AFLP data, and a phylogenetic tree was constructed using the neighbor-joining (NJ) method based on the genetic distance. All the cultivated populations were grouped in a cluster. The natural populations were grouped into two clusters composed of (1) the Sanjiang group (three populations from eastern Tibet and one population from Adong village of Yunnan province) and (2) two populations from Yunnan province and two populations from Sichuan province. The Sanjiang group is more closely related to cultivated populations. These results indicate that the direct ancestor of common buckwheat was natural populations of wild common buckwheat from the Sanjiang area.