Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T03:09:26.594Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Evolution of Castanea sativa Mill, in Turkey and Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2009

F. Villani
Affiliation:
Istituto per l'Agroselvicoltura del C.N.R., Villa Paolina, Porano 05010 TR, Italy
M. Pigliucci*
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs 06269 CT, United States of America
M. Cherubini
Affiliation:
Istituto per l'Agroselvicoltura del C.N.R., Villa Paolina, Porano 05010 TR, Italy
*
* Corresponding author.

Summary

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The evolution of sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) appears to be a complex mixture of long-range gene flow, natural and artificial selection, and local effects of isolation by distance. In this paper we present the most complete analysis to date on the genetic structure and variability of 52 populations of chestnut spanning the entire European area of distribution. The study is based on the use of isozyme data. Our samples came from four major zones, possibly representing relevant steps in the evolution and spread of sweet chestnut in Europe: (i) eastern Turkey, the supposed center of origin of the species; (ii) western Turkey, the area in which human domestication started; (iii) Italy, where domesticated chestnut was first introduced to the rest of Europe by the Romans; and (iv) France, representing the latest phases of the expansion, close to the northern limit of the taxon.

As previous studies based only on Italian and some Turkish populations suggested, the electrophoretic data are consistent with a series of episodes of west- and north-ward migration. The early expansion from the center of origin was probably slow, resulting from natural diffusion of the species. Most of the original genetic variation has been conserved during this phase. Successive episodes of colonization of western Turkey and then of the rest of Europe were probably the more rapid result of human activity. These later stages were associated with genetic drift that reduced the overall heterozygosity of the extant populations. No evidence for selection could be found at the large geographical scale of this study, although previous regional works have shown spatial patterns of allelic frequencies at a few loci and phenotypic differentiation consistent with the action of past selective pressures.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

References

Anagnostakis, S. L. (1982). Biological control of chestnut blight. Science 215, 466471.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barbujani, G. & Pigliucci, M. (1989). Geographical patterns of karyotype polymorphism in Italian populations of Ornithogalum montanum (Liliaceae). Heredity 62, 6775.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barbujani, G. (1987). Autocorrelation of gene frequencies under isolation by distance. Genetics 117, 777782.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. & Edwards, A. W. F. (1967). Phylo-genetic analysis: models and estimation procedures. Evolution 21, 550570.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
da Cuhna, A. B., Burla, H. & Dobzhansky, Th., (1950). Adaptive chromosomal polymorphism in Drosophila willistoni. Evolution 4, 212235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, P. H. (1965). Flora of Turkey, vol. 1, pp. 125. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Farris, J. S. (1972). Estimating phylogenetic trees from distance matrices. The American Naturalist 106, 645668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, H. & Hopkinson, D. A. (1977). Handbook of Enzyme Electrophoresis in Human Genetics. Amsterdam: North Holland Publ. Co.Google Scholar
Heywood, J. S. (1991). Spatial analysis of genetic variation in plant populations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 22, 335355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huntley, B. & Birks, H. J. B. (1983). An Atlas of Past and Present Pollen Maps for Europe: 0–13000 Years Ago. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kosswig, C. (1965). Zoogeography of the Near East. Systematic Zoology 4, 5073.Google Scholar
Mayr, E. (1959). Where are we? Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology 24, 114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nei, M. (1978). Estimation of average heterozygosity and genetic distance from a small number of individuals. Genetics 89, 583590.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nei, M. (1987). Molecular Evolutionary Genetics. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pigliucci, M., Benedettelli, S. & Villani, F. (1990a). Spatial patterns of genetic variability in Italian chestnut (Castanea saliva). Canadian Journal of Botany 68, 19621967.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pigliucci, M., Villani, F. & Benedettelli, S. (1990b). Geographic and climatic factors associated with the spatial structure of gene frequencies in Castanea sativa Mill, from Turkey. Journal of Genetics 69, 141149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulik, M. D. (1957). Starch gel electrophoresis in a discontinuous system of buffers. Nature 180, 1477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prakash, S., Lewontin, R. C. & Hubby, J. L. (1969). A molecular approach to the study of genie heterozygosity in natural populations. IV. Patterns of genic variation in central, marginal and isolated populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 61, 841858.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohlf, F. J. (1987). NTSYS-pc. Setauket, NY: Applied Biostatistics Inc.Google Scholar
Sneath, P. H. A. & Sokal, R. R. (1973). Numerical taxonomy. San Francisco: Freeman and Co.Google Scholar
Sokal, R. R. & Jacquez, G. M. (1991). Testing inferences about microevolutionary process by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis. Evolution 45, 152168.Google ScholarPubMed
Sokal, R. R. & Oden, N. L. (1978a). Spatial autocorrelation in biology. I. Methodology. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 10, 199228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sokal, R. R. & Oden, N. L. (1978b). Spatial autocorrelation in biology. II. Some biological implications and four applications of evolutionary and ecological interest. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 10, 229249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swofford, D. L. (1981). On the utility of the distance Wagner procedure. In Advances in Cladistics: Proceedings of the First Meeting of the Willie Hennig Society (ed. Funk, V. A. and Brooks, D. R.), pp. 2543. New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York.Google Scholar
Swofford, D. L. & Selander, R. B. (1989). BIOSYS-1. IllinoisNatural History Survey.Google Scholar
Villani, F., Benedettelli, S., Paciucci, M., Cherubini, M. & Pigliucci, M. (1990). Genetic variation and differentiation between natural populations of chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) from Italy. In Biochemical Markers in the Population Genetics of Forest Trees (ed. Hattemer, H. H. and Fineschi, S.), pp. 91103. SPB Academic Publishing: The Hague, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Villani, F., Pigliucci, M., Benedettelli, S. & Cherubini, M. (1991). Genetic differentiation among Turkish chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) populations. Heredity 66, 131136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villani, F., Pigliucci, M., Lauteri, M. & Cherubini, M. (1992). Congruence between genetic, morphometric, and physiological data on differentiation of Turkish chestnut (Castanea sativa). Genome 35, 251256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wartenberg, D. (1989). SAAP v. 4.2. Setauket, NY: Exeter Software.Google Scholar
White, M. J. D. (1951). Structural heterozygosity in natural populations of the grasshopper Trimerotropis sparsa. Evolution 5, 376394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, J. B., Ronghua, Y., Mark, A. F. & Agnew, A. D. Q. (1991). A test of the low marginal variance (LMV) theory in Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae). Evolution 45, 780784.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zohary, D. & Hopf, M. (1988). Domestication of Plants in the Old Word. Clarendon Press: Oxford.Google Scholar