OOS 38-2
Evolution in action under global warming: Revisiting Israeli wild cereal populations after 28 years
Climate change is a major environmental stress threatening biodiversity and human civilization. The best hope to secure staple food for humans and animal feed by future crop improvement depends on wild progenitors. In this presentation, we will show the evolution in action for plant flowering phenology under global warning by revisiting Israeli wild cereal populations after 28 years. Specifically, we examined 10 wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides Koern.) populations and 10 wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum K. Koch) populations in Israel, sampling them in 1980 and again in 2008, and performed phenotypic and genotypic analyses on the collected samples. We witnessed the profound adaptive changes of these wild cereals in Israel over the last 28 years in flowering time and simple sequence repeat allelic turnover. The revealed evolutionary changes not only provide a rare glimpse into temporal dimension of evolution in the wild, but also imply unrealized risks present in genetic resources for crop improvement and human food production