Signatures of Environmental Adaptation During Range Expansion of Wild Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris)

Landscape genomics integrates population genetics with landscape ecology, allowing the identification of putative molecular determinants involved in environmental adaptation across the natural geographic and ecological range of populations. Wild Phaseolus vulgaris, the progenitor of common bean (P. vulgaris), has a remarkably extended distribution over 10,000 km from northern Mexico to northwestern Argentina. Earlier research has shown that this distribution represents a range expansion from Mesoamerica to the southern Andes through several discrete migration events and that the species colonized areas with different temperature and rainfall compared to its core area of origin. Thus, this species provides an opportunity to examine to what extent adaptation of a species can be broadened or, conversely, ecological or geographical distribution can be limited by inherent adaptedness. In the current study, we applied a landscape genomics approach to a collection of 246 wild common bean acces...