Environment as a limiting factor of the historical global spread of mungbean.
Elife
; 122023 05 19.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-37204293
Mungbean, also known as green gram, is an important crop plant in China, India, the Philippines and many other countries across Asia. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans first cultivated mungbeans from wild relatives in India over 4,000 years ago. However, it remains unclear how cultivation has spread to other countries and whether human activity alone dictated the route of the cultivated mungbean's expansion across Asia, or whether environmental factors, such as climate, also had an impact. To understand how a species of plant has evolved, researchers may collect specimens from the wild or from cultivated areas. Each group of plants of the same species they collect in a given location at a single point in time is known collectively as an accession. Ong et al. used a combination of genome sequencing, computational modelling and plant biology approaches to study more than 1,000 accessions of cultivated mungbean and trace the route of the crop's expansion across Asia. The data support the archaeological evidence that mungbean cultivation first spread from South Asia to Southeast Asia, then spread northwards to East Asia and afterwards to Central Asia. Computational modelling of local climates and the physical characteristics of different mungbean accessions suggest that the availability of water in the local area likely influenced the route. Specifically, accessions from arid Central Asia were better adapted to drought conditions than accessions from wetter South Asia. However, these drought adaptations decreased the yield of the plants, which may explain why the more drought tolerant accessions have not been widely grown in wetter parts of Asia. This study shows that human activity has not solely dictated where mungbean has been cultivated. Instead, both human activity and the various adaptations accessions evolved in response to their local environments shaped the route the crop took across Asia. In the future these findings may help plant breeders to identify varieties of mungbean and other crops with drought tolerance and other potentially useful traits for agriculture.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Vigna
/
Fabaceae
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Humans
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
En
Journal:
Elife
Year:
2023
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Taiwán
Country of publication:
Reino Unido