Genome analyses reveal the hybrid origin of the staple crop white Guinea yam ( Dioscorea rotundata )

Authors: Yu Sugihara, Kwabena Darkwa, Hiroki Yaegashi, Satoshi Natsume, Motoki Shimizu, Akira Abe, Akiko Hirabuchi, Kazue Ito, Kaori Oikawa, Muluneh Tamiru‐Oli, Atsushi Ohta, Ryo Matsumoto, Paterne A. Agre, David De Koeyer, Babil Pachakkil, Shinşuke Yamanaka, Satoru Muranaka, H. Takagi, Benjamen White, Robert Asiedu, Hideki Innan, Asrat Asfaw, Patrick Adebola, Ryohei Terauchi - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS 2020 cited by 70

Significance Guinea yam is an important staple tuber crop in West Africa, where it contributes to the sustenance and sociocultural lives of millions of people. Understanding the genetic diversity of Guinea yam and its relationships with wild relatives is important for improving this important crop using genomic information. A recent genomics study proposed that Guinea yam originated from a wild relative, the rainforest species Dioscorea praehensilis . Our results based on sequencing of 336 Guinea yam accessions do not support this notion; rather, our results indicate a hybrid origin of Dioscorea rotundata from crosses between the savannah species Dioscorea abyssinica and D. praehensilis.