3,000 Years of Sorghum Genome Evolution: The Birth of a New Crop

All the major cereal crops we use today are the result of a complex origin and ancestry involving different selection pressures over time and introgressions between various populations. The resulting genomes have mosaics of origin, which may confer particular properties, such as domestication syndrome traits or specific environmental tolerances. Archaeogenomics allows the direct reconstruction of genome evolution by getting behind introgression and selection events. Here we show over a three millennium time series how sorghum, the fifth most important cereal crop globally, produced its drought tolerant race through a series of introgressions and progressive selection, as environmental stresses increased over time.