Insights into the Evolutionary History of Sweet Cherry (Prunus avium L.)

The genetic diversity observed in domesticated species results from a complex evolutionary history. The initial bottleneck generally causes a dramatic reduction of genetic diversity in crops. However, when domestication does not imply barriers to the reproduction between cultivated and wild germplasm, the remaining gene flow with wild relatives might limit the loss of diversity in the cultivated germplasm.

Sweet cherry is the domesticated form of wild cherry (Prunus avium L.). Its cultivation was introduced in Western Europe by the Romans, and it is now cultivated worldwide. Using molecular markers such as microsatellites, we investigated the evolution of diversity in this species. From a clustering analysis, we concluded that several domestication events may have happened in sweet cherry. A marked bottleneck due to breeding was detected in the modern sweet cherry gene pool, but the microsatellites did not detect the bottleneck due to domestication in the analyzed samples. Our results also showed that intense gene flow from local wild cherry was probably maintained along the evolutionary history of the species.

In this talk, we will present these results, and enlarge the discussion to a comparison with data from other fruit species.