Posts Tagged: new
New weed in California rice: White Water Fire (Bergia capensis)
Background White water fire (Bergia capensis) was found in September of 2023, by the Butte County...
Orie Shafer: Researching the Sleep of a Fruit Fly
Did you know that the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a powerful model organism for the...
A fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, feeding on a banana. (Photo by Sanjay Acharya, Wikipedia)
A Fascinating, Must-Read Book: 'The Lives of Butterflies'
“Butterflies are treasures, like great works of art. Should we not value them as much as the...
In the field: David James, an entomologist and associate professor at Washington State University.
A monarch butterfly on Tithonia rotundifola in Vacaville, Calif. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
WSU Entomologist David James on Irish Podcast: Exploring The Lives of Butterflies
You'll want to hear Ireland scientist Éanna Ní Lamhna's RTÉ podcast featuring...
A male monarch nectaring on a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola, in a Vacaville, Calif. garden. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A New Avocado Race?
Persea americana is the botanical name for avocado. It's been traditionally subdivided into tribes or groups comprising the Mexican, Guatemalan and West Indian horticultural races. The races look, taste and even smell different, but they hybridize easily so, they are considered one species. All the breeding that is done to create more and different and hopefully better avocado trees and fruit and roots is done with these three races. Now, plant explorers have been looking in a different area of South America and think they have found a new race:
"Pleistocene-dated genomic divergence of avocado trees supports cryptic diversity in the Colombian germplasm" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11295-023-01616-8).
This study identified two ancient Colombian genetic clusters of avocados beyond the three traditionally recognized races. These cryptic groups were genetically different and presented minor heterozygosity scores, with possible origin from the West Indian group (alternatively, although less parsimonious, it could also be the case that the West Indian radiate from the Colombian group). The Colombian sub-populations are in two distinct geographic regions, the Andes and the Caribbean, which may reflect divergent local adaptation after the initial colonization from Mesoamerica during the Pleistocene. Exploring the avocado genetic resources in South America will allow identifying genotypes with superior characteristics adapted to diverse agro-ecologies, which may source the selection of new cultivars and rootstock genotypes.
It is a somewhat dense discussion of the process of identifying this new race, but it's a fun look at the sleuthing process.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11295-023-01616-8
Image: The now extinct giant ground sloth was considered one of the major agents of avocado seed distribution before humans.
ground sloth