David Bertioli, a plant geneticist from the Universidade de Brasília who is working at the University of Georgia, will deliver a lecture Wednesday on the genome sequences of peanut’s diploid ancestors. While the lecture will be presented in Athens, Ga., researchers around the state and across the globe can listen in.
Working with the International Peanut Genome Initiative, or IPGI, Bertioli traced the origins of the modern peanut to a wild plant from Bolivia, which is the prehistoric ancestor of today’s cultivated peanut species.
The peanut that is grown by farmers today is a hybrid of two wild species that was cultivated by ancient inhabitants of South America and, by selection, was transformed into today’s crop plant. Comparisons of the DNA sequences of one of the wild species and the cultivated peanut showed that they are 99.96 percent identical.
“It’s almost as if we had traveled back in time and sampled the same plant that gave rise to cultivated peanuts from the gardens of these ancient people,” Bertioli said in an article published by UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Horticulture and begins at 3:30 p.m. To join, go to Zoom and enter the meeting ID 678 329 704 or go here: https://zoom.us/j/678329704