Olive domestication and diversification in the Mediterranean Basin

Abstract

Olive (Olea europaea ssp. europaea) is the most important oil fruit crop in temperate areas, but the origin of the cultivated olive remains unclear. The existence of one or several domestication events in the Mediterranean Basin (MB) is still debated. We analyzed a dataset of 387 cultivated and wild accessions that were genotyped at 25 simple-sequence repeat (SSR) loci. The sample represented genetic diversity at the geographic extremes of the MB. We inferred relationships among samples and also applied approximate Bayesian computation to estimate the most probable demographic model of our samples. Cultivated olives clustered into three different gene pools (Q1, Q2 and Q3), corresponding loosely to the west, central and eastern MB, respectively. Q1 consisted primarily of accessions from southern Spain, retained the fingerprint of a genetic bottleneck, and was closely related to accessions from the eastern MB. Q2 showed signs of recent admixture with wild olives and may derive from a local domestication event in the central MB. Overall our results suggest that admixture shaped olive germplasm and perhaps also local domestication events.