Diversity of farmed and wild Clarkia pulchella

Seed production on native seed farms has increased to meet the rising demand for plant material for restoration. While these propagation efforts are necessary for restoration, cultivating wild populations may also result in unintentional selection and elicit evolutionary changes that mimic crop domestication, essentially turning these efforts into artificial domestication experiments. Here, we investigated whether genomic changes associated with domestication occurred in the wildflower Clarkia pulchella Pursh (Onagraceae) by comparing the wild source populations to the farmed population after eight generations of cultivation. Data from >6,500 SNPs revealed that mean expected heterozygosity of the farmed population was significantly lower than the wild populations, despite the fact that the farmed population originated from a pool of multiple wild populations. This is consistent with predictions for plant domestication, although the rate of diversity loss was extremely rapid.