Data from: Genetic diversity and environmental adaptation in Ethiopian tef

Orphan crops serve as essential resources for both nutrition and income in
local communities and offer potential solutions to the challenges of food
security and climate vulnerability. Tef [Eragrostis tef (Zucc.)], a
small-grained allotetraploid, C4 cereal mainly cultivated in Ethiopia,
stands out for its adaptability to marginal conditions and high
nutritional value, which holds both local and global promise. Despite its
significance, tef is considered an orphan crop due to limited genetic
improvement efforts, reliance on subsistence farming, and its nutritional,
economic, and cultural importance. Although pre-Semitic inhabitants of
Ethiopia have cultivated tef for millennia (4000-1000 BCE), the genetic
and environmental drivers of local adaptation remain poorly understood. To
address this, we resequenced a diverse collection of traditional tef
varieties to investigate their genetic structure and identify genomic
regions under environmental selection using redundancy analysis (RDA),
complemented by single-site differentiation and LD-based methods. We
identified 145 loci associated with abiotic environmental factors, with
minimal geographic influence observed in the genetic structure of the
sample population. Overall, this work contributes to the broader
understanding of local adaptation and its genetic basis in tef, providing
insights that support efforts to develop elite germplasms with improved
environmental resilience.