Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley

2024/07/11 by Jacob B. Landis, Angelica M. Guercio, Keely E. Brown +3 · 1 voice · 17 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Adaptation (eye) #Allele #Biology #Diversification (marketing strategy) #Ecological selection #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary biology #Gene #Genetic diversity #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genetic variation #Genetics #Multicellular organism #Natural selection #Population #Population genetics #Selection (genetic algorithm) #Wheat and Barley Genetics and Pathology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.adl0038

published in Science 385(6705), eadl0038 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)

openalex publication_date 2024/07/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Direct observation is central to our understanding of adaptation, but evolution is rarely documented in a large, multicellular organism for more than a few generations. In this study, we observed evolution across a century-scale competition experiment, barley composite cross II (CCII). CCII was founded in 1929 in Davis, California, with thousands of genotypes, but we found that natural selection has massively reduced genetic diversity, leading to a single lineage constituting most of the population by generation 50. Selection favored alleles originating from climates similar to that of Davis and targeted loci contributing to reproductive development, including the barley diversification loci Vrs1 , HvCEN , Ppd-H1 , and Vrn-H2 . Our findings point to selection as the predominant force shaping genomic variation in one of the world’s oldest biological experiments.

Citations

• Some distance properties of latent root and vector methods used in multivariate analysis

Cited by

• Benchmarking imputation accuracy in the presence or absence of a reference panel
• Convergence and parallelism in the evolution of plant metabolism
• The optimization of crop response to climatic stress through modulation of plant stress response mechanisms. Opportunities for biostimulants and plant hormones to meet climate challenges

Discussions

• Almost 100 years of a barley common garden experiment involving reciprocal crossing showed a rapid decrease in genetic diversity with around 60% of progeny deriving from a single parent after 50 gener [bsky, 22 points, 1 comments]

Related

• The limits of selection under plant domestication
• The evolutionary patterns of barley pericentromeric chromosome regions, as shaped by linkage disequilibrium and domestication
• Phenotypically Wild Barley Shows Evidence of Introgression From Domesticated Barley
• Domestication and crop evolution of wheat and barley: Genes, genomics, and future directions
• Environmental genomic selection to leverage polygenic local adaptation in barley landraces