# Shedding light on the evolutionary history of wild and cultivated african sorghum: the guinea margaritiferum case

Aude Gilabert, Concetta Burgarella, Caroline Calatayud, Angélique Berger, Jean-François Rami, David Pot, Monique Deu

► To cite this version:

Aude Gilabert, Concetta Burgarella, Caroline Calatayud, Angélique Berger, Jean-François Rami, et al.. Shedding light on the evolutionary history of wild and cultivated african sorghum: the guinea margaritiferum case. Sorghum in the 21st Century, Global Sorghum Conference, CIRAD; Kansas State University; Collaborative Research on Sorghum and Millet; SorghumID; IRD; CERAAS, Jun 2023, Montpellier, France. pp.233. hal-05181922

HAL Id: hal-05181922

https://hal.science/hal-05181922v1

Submitted on 23 Jul 2025

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# Sorghum in the 21st Century
## Global Sorghum Conference

Resiliency and Sustainability in the Face of Climate Change

June 5-9 2023 The Corum Event Center, Montpellier, France

Lead Sponsor

KANSAS STATE
UNIVERSITY.

College of Agriculture

Supporting the

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INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF
MILLETS
2023

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## BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

PROGRAM - ABSTRACTS

List of posters - List of participants

List of exhibitors - Exhibition plan

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cirad

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Sorghum
Institut d'Études
Raisonnées
pour l'Étude de l'Alimentation
FRANCE

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CERAMS
Centre d'Etude régionale
de rédaction à la sauveté
# Shedding light on the evolutionary history of wild and cultivated African sorghum : “the guinea margaritiferum case”

Aude Gilabert<fnref n="1" /> (aude.gilabert@cirad.fr), Concetta Burgarella², Caroline Calatayud<fnref n="1" />, Angélique Berger<fnref n="1" />, Jean-François Rami<fnref n="1" />, David Pot<fnref n="1" />, Monique Deu<fnref n="1" />

Throughout their domestication process, the evolution of cultivated plants has been in part driven by their intimate relationships with humans, resulting in strong directional selection and short and long-range dispersal movements due to the farmers' practices and their social organization. Beside these anthropic effects, gene flow with wild relatives remained highly active, leading to introgression events in both compartments. African sorghum constitutes a relevant case study as it is grown close to its wild relatives and its diversity is modelled by specific anthropic drivers.

To unravel the origin and evolutionary history of sorghum, an adequate sampling of the cultivated and wild compartments as well as the correct classification of each analyzed accession is a prerequisite. However, as sorghum is cultivated in sympatry with its wild relatives and as gene flow between the two compartments may occur, unambiguous assignments of accessions in these 2 compartments is far from obvious. Here, we used a combination of grain morphological and genomic data to validate the status of the accessions (wild vs cultivated) and investigate their evolutionary relationships. In addition, the guinea margaritiferum sub-race which has been suggested as a second potential domestication event in Western Africa has been more intensively sampled. We genotyped 139 wild samples and 243 cultivated accessions representative of the worldwide diversity, among which 50 guinea margaritiferum. We identified two margaritiferum groups that are genetically close to a group of wild accessions from Mali and bear signals of introgression with wild accessions from out of Western Africa but also with cultivated guinea from Western Africa. Our results indicate a complex history of the sorghum domestication, especially in Western Africa where gene flow between wild and cultivated sorghums might have led to the emergence of a peculiar group of sorghum.

<footnote n="1">¹ AGAP Institut, Cirad, Montpellier, France ; ² Department of Organismal Biology, Evolutionary Biology Center, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden</footnote>