Six-rowed wild-growing barleys are hybrids of diverse origins

Abstract

Crop–wild gene flow is common when domesticated plants and their wild relatives grow close to each other. The resultant hybrid forms appear as semi-domesticates and were sometimes considered as missing links between crops and their wild progenitors. Wild-growing barleys in Central and Eastern Asia, named Hordeum agriocrithon, show hallmark characters of both wild and domesticated forms. Their spikes disintegrate at maturity to disperse without human intervention, but bear lateral grains, which were favored by early farmers and are absent from other wild barleys. As an intermediate form, H. agriocrithon has been proposed several times as a progenitor of domesticated barley. Here, we used genome-wide marker data and whole-genome resequencing to show that all H. agriocrithon accessions of a major germplasm collection are hybrid forms that arose multiple times by admixture of diverse domesticated and wild populations. Although H. agriocrithon barleys have not played a special role in barley domestication, future analysis of the adaptative potential of bi-directional crop–wild gene flow in extant barleys may prove a fertile research field.