Evolutionary origins of taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Southeast Asia.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ahmed I
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7713977 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Evolutionary origins of taro (<i>Colocasia esculenta</i>) in Southeast Asia.
Ahmed Ibrar I Lockhart Peter J PJ Agoo Esperanza M G EMG Naing Kyaw W KW Nguyen Dzu V DV Medhi Dilip K DK Matthews Peter J PJ
Ecology and evolution 20201102 23
As an ancient clonal root and leaf crop, taro (<i>Colocasia esculenta</i>, Araceae) is highly polymorphic with uncertain genetic and geographic origins. We explored chloroplast DNA diversity in cultivated and wild taros, and closely related wild taxa, and found cultivated taro to be polyphyletic, with tropical and temperate clades that appear to originate in Southeast Asia sensu lato. A third clade was found exclusively in wild populations from Southeast Asia to Australia and Papua New Guinea. O ...[more]
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Project description:Breast cancer mortality is primarily due to the occurrence of metastatic disease. We have identified a novel potential therapeutic agent derived from an edible root of the plant Colocasia esculenta, commonly known as taro, which has demonstrable activity in a preclinical model of metastatic breast cancer and that should have minimal toxicity. We have shown for the first time that a water-soluble extract of taro (TE) potently inhibits lung-colonizing ability and spontaneous metastasis from mammary gland-implanted tumors, in a murine model of highly metastatic estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and Her-2/neu-negative breast cancer. TE modestly inhibits the proliferation of some, but not all, breast and prostate cancer cell lines. Morphological changes including cell rounding were observed. Tumor cell migration was completely blocked by TE. TE treatment also inhibited prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) synthesis and downregulated cyclooxygenase 1 and 2 mRNA expression. We purified the active compound(s) to near homogeneity with antimetastatic activity comparable with stock TE. The active compound with a native size of approximately 25 kDa contains two fragments of nearly equal size. The N-terminal amino acid sequencing of both fragments reveals that the active compound is highly related to three taro proteins: 12-kDa storage protein, tarin and taro lectin. All are similar in terms of amino acid sequence, posttranslational processing and all contain a carbohydrate-binding domain. This is the first report describing compound(s) derived from taro that potently and specifically inhibits tumor metastasis.
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Project description:Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is widely distributed in tropical and sub-tropical areas. However, its origin, diversification and dispersal remain unclear. While taro genetic diversity has been documented at the country and regional levels in Asia and the Pacific, few reports are available from Americas and Africa where it has been introduced through human migrations. We used eleven microsatellite markers to investigate the diversity and diversification of taro accessions from nineteen countries in Asia, the Pacific, Africa and America. The highest genetic diversity and number of private alleles were observed in Asian accessions, mainly from India. While taro has been diversified in Asia and the Pacific mostly via sexual reproduction, clonal reproduction with mutation appeared predominant in African and American countries investigated. Bayesian clustering revealed a first genetic group of diploids from the Asia-Pacific region and to a second diploid-triploid group mainly from India. Admixed cultivars between the two genetic pools were also found. In West Africa, most cultivars were found to have originated from India. Only one multi-locus lineage was assigned to the Asian pool, while cultivars in Madagascar originated from India and Indonesia. The South African cultivars shared lineages with Japan. The Caribbean Islands cultivars were found to have originated from the Pacific, while in Costa Rica they were from India or admixed between Indian and Asian groups. Taro dispersal in the different areas of Africa and America is thus discussed in the light of available records of voyages and settlements.
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Project description:BackgroundTaro has a long history of being consumed and remains orphan and on the hand Nigeria farmers. The role of farmer-driven artificial selection is not negligible to fit landraces to a particular ecological condition. Limited study has been conducted on genome-wide association and no study has been conducted on genome-environment association for clinal adaptation for taro. Therefore, the objective of this study was to detect loci that are associated with environmental variables and phenotype traits and forward input to breeders. The study used 92 geographical referred taro landraces collected from Southeast (SE) Nigeria.ResultsThe result indicates that SE Nigerian taro has untapped phenotype and genetic variability with low admixture. Redundancy analysis indicated that collinear explained SNP variation more than single climatic variable. Overall, the results indicated that no single method exclusively was able to capture population confounding effects better than the others for all six traits. Nevertheless, based on overall model performance, Blink seemed to provide slight advantage over other models and was selected for all subsequent assessment of genome-environment association (GEA) and genome-wide association study (GWAS) models. Genome scan and GEA identified local adapted loci and co-located genes. A total of nine SNP markers associated with environmental variables. Some of the SNP markers (such as S_101024366) co-located with genes which previously reported for climatic adaptation such as astringency, diaminopimelate decarboxylase and MYB transcription factor. Genome-wide association also identified 45, 40 and 34 significant SNP markers associated with studied traits in combined, year 1 and year 2 data sets, respectively. Out of these, five SNP markers (S1_18891752 S3_100795476, S1_100584471 S1_100896936 and S2_10058799) were consistent in two different data sets.ConclusionsThe findings from this study improve our understanding of the genetic control of adaptive and phenotypic traits in Nigerian taro. However, the study suggests further study on identification of local adaptive loci and GWAS through collection of more landraces throughout the country, and across different agro-ecologies.
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Project description:Taro, Colocasia esculenta, is one of the world's oldest root crops and is of particular economic and cultural significance in Hawai'i, where historically more than 150 different landraces were grown. We developed a genome-wide set of more than 2400 high-quality single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers from 70 taro accessions of Hawaiian, South Pacific, Palauan, and mainland Asian origins, with several objectives: 1) uncover the phylogenetic relationships between Hawaiian and other Pacific landraces, 2) shed light on the history of taro cultivation in Hawai'i, and 3) develop a tool to discriminate among Hawaiian and other taros. We found that almost all existing Hawaiian landraces fall into 5 monophyletic groups that are largely consistent with the traditional Hawaiian classification based on morphological characters, for example, leaf shape and petiole color. Genetic diversity was low within these clades but considerably higher between them. Population structure analyses further indicated that the diversification of taro in Hawai'i most likely occurred by a combination of frequent somatic mutation and occasional hybridization. Unexpectedly, the South Pacific accessions were found nested within the clades mainly composed of Hawaiian accessions, rather than paraphyletic to them. This suggests that the origin of clades identified here preceded the colonization of Hawai'i and that early Polynesian settlers brought taro landraces from different clades with them. In the absence of a sequenced genome, this marker set provides a valuable resource towards obtaining a genetic linkage map and to study the genetic basis of phenotypic traits of interest to taro breeding such as disease resistance.
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