An improved assembly of the pearl millet reference genome using Oxford Nanopore long reads and optical mapping.

Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.)) R. Br.

Genomic footprints of selection in early-and late-flowering pearl millet landraces.

Pearl millet is among the top three-cereal production in one of the most climate vulnerable regions, sub-Saharan Africa. Its Sahelian origin makes it adapted to grow in poor sandy soils under low soil water regimes. Pearl millet is thus considered today as one of the most interesting crops to face the global warming.

GWAS unveils features between early- and late-flowering pearl millets.

Background: Pearl millet, a nutritious food for around 100 million people in Africa and India, displays extensive genetic diversity and a high degree of admixture with wild relatives. Two major morphotypes can be distinguished in Senegal: early-flowering Souna and late-flowering Sanio. Phenotypic variabilities related to flowering time play an important role in the adaptation of pearl millet to climate variability.

Pearl millet genomic vulnerability to climate change in West Africa highlights the need for regional collaboration.

Climate change is already affecting agro-ecosystems and threatening food security by reducing crop productivity and increasing harvest uncertainty. Mobilizing crop diversity could be an efficient way to mitigate its impact. We test this hypothesis in pearl millet, a nutritious staple cereal cultivated in arid and low-fertility soils in sub-Saharan Africa.

Abandonment of pearl millet cropping and homogenization of its diversity over a 40 year period in Senegal.

Cultivated diversity is considered an insurance against major climatic variability. However, since the 1980s, several studies have shown that climate variability and agricultural changes may already have locally eroded crop genetic diversity. We studied pearl millet diversity in Senegal through a comparison of pearl millet landraces collected 40 years apart.

A guinea fowl genome assembly provides new evidence on evolution following domestication and selection in galliformes.

The helmeted guinea fowl Numida meleagris belongs to the order Galliformes. Its natural range includes a large part of sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal to Eritrea and from Chad to South Africa. Archaeozoological and artistic evidence suggest domestication of this species may have occurred about 2,000 years BP in Mali and Sudan primarily as a food resource, although villagers also benefit from its capacity to give loud alarm calls in case of danger, of its ability to consume parasites such as ticks and to hunt snakes, thus suggesting its domestication may have resulted from a commensal association process.

Adaptive Introgression: An Untapped Evolutionary Mechanism for Crop Adaptation.

Global environmental changes strongly impact wild and domesticated species biology and their associated ecosystem services. For crops, global warming has led to significant changes in terms of phenology and/or yield. To respond to the agricultural challenges of this century, there is a strong need for harnessing the genetic variability of crops and adapting them to new conditions.

A western Sahara centre of domestication inferred from pearl millet genomes.

There have been intense debates over the geographic origin of African crops and agriculture. Here, we used whole-genome sequencing data to infer the domestication origin of pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus). Our results supported an origin in western Sahara, and we dated the onset of cultivated pearl millet expansion in Africa to 4,900 years ago.

New Genetic Insights into Pearl Millet Diversity As Revealed by Characterization of Early- and Late-Flowering Landraces from Senegal.

Pearl millet ( (L.) R. Br.

No Excess of Cis-Regulatory Variation Associated with Intraspecific Selection in Wild Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus).

Several studies suggest that cis-regulatory mutations are the favorite target of evolutionary changes, one reason being that cis-regulatory mutations might have fewer deleterious pleiotropic effects than protein-coding mutations. A review of the process also suggests that this bias towards adaptive cis-regulatory variation might be less pronounced at the intraspecific level compared with the interspecific level. In this study, we assessed the contribution of cis-regulatory variation to adaptation at the intraspecific level using populations of wild pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus ssp.

Genome scan reveals selection acting on genes linked to stress response in wild pearl millet.

Uncovering genomic regions involved in adaption is a major goal in evolutionary biology. High-throughput sequencing now makes it possible to tackle this challenge in nonmodel species. Yet, despite the increasing number of methods targeted to specifically detect genomic footprints of selection, the complex demography of natural populations often causes high rates of false positive in gene discoveries.

Genotyping-by-Sequencing SNP Identification for Crops without a Reference Genome: Using Transcriptome Based Mapping as an Alternative Strategy.

Next-generation sequencing opens the way for genomic studies of diversity even for non-model crops and animals. Genome reduction techniques are becoming progressively more popular as they allow a fraction of the genome to be sequenced for multiple individuals and/or populations. These techniques are an efficient way to explore genome diversity in non-model crops and animals for which no reference genome is available.

Long-distance dispersal maximizes evolutionary potential during rapid geographic range expansion.

Conventional wisdom predicts that sequential founder events will cause genetic diversity to erode in species with expanding geographic ranges, limiting evolutionary potential at the range margin. Here, we show that invasive European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in South Africa preserve genetic diversity during range expansion, possibly as a result of frequent long-distance dispersal events. We further show that unfavourable environmental conditions trigger enhanced dispersal, as indicated by signatures of selection detected across the expanding range.

Uncontrolled admixture and loss of genetic diversity in a local Vietnamese pig breed.

The expansion of intensive livestock production systems in developing countries has increased the introduction of highly productive exotic breeds facilitating indiscriminate crossbreeding with local breeds. In this study, we set out to investigate the genetic status of the Vietnamese Black H'mong pig breed by evaluating (1) genetic diversity and (2) introgression from exotic breeds. Two exotic breeds, namely Landrace and Yorkshire used for crossbreeding, and the H'mong pig population from Ha Giang (HG) province were investigated using microsatellite markers.

Spatial sorting drives morphological variation in the invasive bird, Acridotheris tristis.

The speed of range expansion in many invasive species is often accelerating because individuals with stronger dispersal abilities are more likely to be found at the range front. This 'spatial sorting' of strong dispersers will drive the acceleration of range expansion. In this study, we test whether the process of spatial sorting is at work in an invasive bird population (Common myna, Acridotheris tristis) in South Africa.