PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rute R. da Fonseca
AU  - Bruce D. Smith
AU  - Nathan Wales
AU  - Enrico Cappellini
AU  - Pontus Skoglund
AU  - Matteo Fumagalli
AU  - José Alfredo Samaniego
AU  - Christian Carøe
AU  - María C. Ávila-Arcos
AU  - David E. Hufnagel
AU  - Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen
AU  - Filipe Garrett Vieira
AU  - Mattias Jakobsson
AU  - Bernardo Arriaza
AU  - Eske Willerslev
AU  - Rasmus Nielsen
AU  - Matthew B. Hufford
AU  - Anders Albrechtsen
AU  - Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
AU  - M. Thomas P. Gilbert
TI  - The origin and evolution of maize in the American Southwest
AID  - 10.1101/013540
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 013540
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/01/11/013540.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/01/11/013540.full
AB  - Maize offers an ideal system through which to demonstrate the potential of ancient population genomic techniques for reconstructing the evolution and spread of domesticates. The diffusion of maize from Mexico into the North American Southwest (SW) remains contentious with the available evidence being restricted to morphological studies of ancient maize plant material. We captured 1 Mb of nuclear DNA from 32 archaeological maize samples spanning 6000 years and compared them with modern landraces including those from the Mexican West coast and highlands. We found that the initial diffusion of domesticated maize into the SW is likely to have occurred through a highland route. However, by 2000 years ago a Pacific coastal corridor was also being used. Furthermore, we could distinguish between genes that were selected for early during domestication (such as zagl1 involved in shattering) from genes that changed in the SW context (e.g. related to sugar content and adaptation to drought) likely as a response to the local arid environment and new cultural uses of maize.