APG faculty member Peter Morrell’s work with an experimental barley population founded in 1929—one of the world’s oldest ongoing biological experiments—has been published in Science.
Daniel Koenig of the University of California, Riverside, led the research described in the paper, “Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley.”
The research team has been investigating the adaptation process in a nearly century-old barley experimental population that has been grown over 58 generations in Davis, California. The population was initiated by crossing 28 barley varieties, but by later generations, it was dominated by a handful of lineages that derive primarily from barley lines grown in a Mediterranean climate. The nature of adaptation in this population likely closely mimics the breeding process for many crops, where minimal or less active breeding efforts shape the genetic composition of local populations. The nature of the genetic changes in the population provides insight into how climatic adaptation occurs.
The team of researchers also included Jacob B. Landis, Angelic M. Guerico, Keely E. Brown, and Christopher J. Fiscus.
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