Ecological and genetic modifications accompanying crop domestication
In collaboration with Jane Bradbury, Patrice David, Marianne Elias, François Massol, Doyle McKey, Caroline Roullier.
Most of this work was conducted during my PhD thesis at CEFE in Montpellier, supervised by Doyle McKey. Through selecting for certain agronomic characteristics, the process of plant (and animal) domestication leads both to the joint selection of traits that were not directly selected for. For this reason, hybridization with wild relatives may lead to maladapted crop-wild hybrids.
Domestication leaves genetic signatures allowing one to retrace the geographic history of crops (and of the displacements or hanging interactions of the networks of people cultivating them); we studied these for two crops, cassava and sweet potato.
Together with many other crops, both these plants are propagated clonally, which raises questions as to how their diversity can be maintained (and not lost by chance).