The history of maize domestication and adaptation as revealed by a genome-wide survey of SNP

During the past two decades, researchers have depicted the history of maize domestication and adaptation using genetic information of cultivated maize and its wild relatives (Matsuoka et al., 2002; Wright et al., 2005; van Heerwaarden et al., 2011; Hufford et al., 2012a; Pyhajarvi et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2015), but efforts have been limited either in sample size or range. Here, a large population including 982 maize inbred lines which represent global tropical, subtropical, and temperate germplasm and 190 teosinte accessions from Mexico and Central America were genotyped using Illumina MaizeSNP50 BeadChip to (1) define the Zea genetic structure, (2) estimate the magnitude of introgression from parviglumis and mexicana into the domesticated maize gene pool, (3) identify the loci underwent selection during maize domestication and adaptation, and (4) associate the selected loci with the key domestication and adaptation traits.