The indigenous population of the Canary Islands, which colonized the archipelago around the 3rd century CE, provides both a window into the past of North Africa and a unique model to explore the effects of insularity. We generate genome-wide data from 40 individuals from the seven islands, dated between the 3rd–16rd centuries CE. Along with components already present in Moroccan Neolithic populations, the Canarian natives show signatures related to Bronze Age expansions in Eurasia and trans-Saharan migrations. The lack of gene flow between islands and constant or decreasing effective population sizes suggest that populations were isolated. While some island populations maintained relatively high genetic diversity, with the only detected bottleneck coinciding with the colonization time, other islands with fewer natural resources show the effects of insularity and isolation. Finally, consistent genetic differentiation between eastern and western islands points to a more complex colonization process than previously thought.

Los numerosos cambios ocurridos en la marina natural de Arrecife en los últimos años ocasionaron una regresión de las praderas de Zostera noltii Hornemann, planta marina catalogada en Canarias en la categoría de “Peligro de Extinción”. Los ejemplares supervivientes representan individuos clónicos, lo cual refuerza el diagnóstico sobre el estado crítico de esta población natural. Se discuten, al final de este artículo, diferentes consideraciones en el contexto de la genética de poblaciones con vistas a un plan de actuación para restaurar el ecosistema de la marina de Arrecife.

Banana cultivars of agronomic interest have been genetically characterized using two different molecular markers. On the one hand, a panel of 14 trinucleotide single sequence repeats (SSRs or microsatellites) was optimized for homogeneous PCR conditions. It was tested with 50 individuals from seven cultivars, yielding 76 alleles and 5.4 ± 1.8 alleles per locus, while the presence of cultivar-exclusive alleles allowed the discrimination of all cultivars. On the other hand, a retrotransposon-based marker system named inter-primer binding site (iPBS) was implemented for the first time in the Musa genus. A total of 120 bands were detected in eight different Musa cultivars, from which 65.8% were polymorphic and 23.3% were cultivar exclusive. Both techniques allowed a cut-off identification of all cultivars studied, but overall, iPBS analysis was a more straightforward and economical choice. Despite the fact that we were unable to distinguish local banana varieties belonging to the same cultivar, new cultivar-specific molecular markers have been developed for the Musa genus, which could be used to guide new breeding programmes and maintain high quality of Plátano de Canarias.

Los escasos ejemplares que subsisten de la antigua pradera de Zostera nolti Hornemann de Arrecife (Lanzarote), son individuos clónicos y únicos representantes del taxón en el archipiélago Canario. Con vistas a un plan de actuación para recuperar el ecosistema de La Marina de Arrecife, se comparan genéticamente muestras de tres praderas de la angiosperma, suficientemente distanciadas, en el Atlántico templado oriental. Se trata de conocer, desde un punto de vista genético, si existen diferencias entre poblaciones situadas en el archipiélago Canario (Lanzarote), Península Ibérica (Cádiz) y NO de África (Mauritania, Banc d’Arguin).