Rescuing the adaptive secrets of ancient quinoa

Quinoa is a highly nutritious grain identified by the UN as an essential crop to improve world food security.

Pre-Columbian cultures started the domestication of quinoa about 7,000-years ago in the highland and coastal environments of the Andes where it is adapted to various biotic and abiotic stresses.

The spread of quinoa out the centres of domestication likely required adaptation to new environments supported by favourable alleles at critical genetic and epigenetic loci.

However, domestication as an intensive selection process can also lead to a reduction of the genetic diversity of domesticates, reducing their adaptability plants and threatening food security.

Accessing the genetic makeup of dated archaeobotanical samples provides a powerful opportunity to examine the genomic information that has changed at various stages of domestication, enabling the identification of lost genetic diversity at key loci.

Archaeological studies have reported quinoa remains dating back to 4,000-years before present, but the ancient genetic diversity remains under characterised.

PALEOQUINOA will take advantage of the excellent preservation of ancient DNA molecules in archaeological specimens to track the genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic changes in quinoa in the last 3,500-years.

The unique combination of advanced ancient DNA techniques and cutting-edge computational methods will generate the first genome-scale dataset of ancient quinoa and characterise the domestication history of this crop.

In addition to the genome, PALEOQUINOA will also investigate, for the first time, the transcriptome and epigenetic regulatory gene expression networks of ancient quinoa seeds, in relation to environmental changes.

The new knowledge gained through this multidisciplinary approach will shed light into the evolutionary history of crop domestication and facilitate improvements in the genetic makeup of quinoa to increase its suitability as a crop at the time of ongoing biodiversity crisis.