Background
The domestication process of Asian rice (
Oryza sativa
L.) is complicated. It’s well established that
Oryza rufipogon
is the ancestor of Asian rice, although the number of domestication events still controversial. Recently, numerous types of studies based on rice nuclear genome have been conducted, but the results are quite different. Chloroplasts (cp) are also part of the rice genome and have a conserved cyclic structure that is valuable for plant genetics and evolutionary studies. Therefore, we conducted chloroplast-based studies, aiming to provide more evidence for the domestication of Asian rice.
Results
A total of 1389 variants were detected from the chloroplast genomes of 412 accessions obtained through the world.
Oryza sativa
L. ssp.
japonica
exhibited slightly less diversity (
π
) than
Oryza sativa L. indica
and wild rice. The fixation index values (
F
ST
) revealed that
indica
and
japonica
exhibited farther genetic distances compared with wild rice. Across cp genome, Tajima’s
D
test demonstrated that different selection sites occurred in Asian rice. Principal component analyses (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) clearly classify the Asian rice into different groups. Furthermore, introgression patterns identified that
indica
and
japonica
shared no introgression events in cp level, and phylogenetic studies showed cultivated rice were well separated from different type of wild rice.
Conclusions
Here, we focus on the domestication of Asian rice (
indica
and
japonica
). Diversity and phylogenetic analyses revealed some selection characteristics in the chloroplast genome that potentially occurred in different Asian rice during the domestication. The results shown that Asian rice had been domesticated at least twice. In additional,
japonica
may experience a strong positive selection or bottleneck event during the domestication.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1186/s12284-019-0322-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.