Six-rowed wild-growing barley WGS

Wild-growing barleys in Central and 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 that were favored by early farmers, which 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. agriothons accessions of a major germplasm collection are hybrid forms that arose multiple times by admixture of diverse domesticated and wild populations. Illumina whole-genome shotgun data of 17 barley (Hordeum vulgare) crop-wild hybrids (Hordeum agriocrithon).