Cucumber ( Cucumis sativus ) and melon ( C. melo ) have numerous wild relatives in Asia and Australia, and the sister species of melon is from Australia

Abstract

Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and melon (C. melo) have numerous wild relatives in Asia and Australia, and the sister species of melon is from Australia MO, and approved June 16, 2010 (received for review April 19, 2010) Among the fundamental questions regarding cultivated plants is their geographic origin and region of domestication. The genus Cucumis, which includes cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and melon (Cucumis melo), has numerous wild African species, and it has therefore been assumed that melon originated in Africa. For cucumber, this seemed less likely because wild cucumbers exist in India and a closely related species lives in the Eastern Himalayas. Using DNA sequences from plastid and nuclear markers for some 100 Cucumis accessions from Africa, Australia, and Asia, we show here that melon and cucumber are of Asian origin and have numerous previously overlooked species-level relatives in Australia and around the Indian Ocean. The wild progenitor of C. melo occurs in India, and our data confirm that the Southeast Asian Cucumis hystrix is the closest relative of cucumber. Most surprisingly, the closest relative of melon is Cucumis picrocarpus from Australia. C. melo diverged from this Australian sister species approximately 3 Ma, and both diverged from the remaining Asian/Australian species approximately 10 Ma. The Asian/Australian Cucumis clade comprises at least 25 species, nine of them new to science, and diverged from its African relatives in the Miocene, approximately 12 Ma. Range reconstruction under maximum likelihood suggests Asia as the ancestral area for the most recent common ancestor of melon and cucumber, fitting with both having progenitor populations in the Himalayan region and high genetic diversity of C. melo landraces in India and China. Future investigations of wild species related to melon and cucumber should concentrate on Asia and Australia.ancestral areas | crops | economic plants | wild progenitors A mong the most fundamental and debated questions regarding the evolution of cultivated plants is their geographic origin and region of domestication (1). Recent phylogeographic and phylogenetic work on cassava, pumpkin, corn, potato, and rice (2-6) has uncovered the likely places of origin and domestication of these crops. Although many premolecular hypotheses about the domestication of particular species still require testing, it is clear that the Indo-Chinese region has produced a particularly long list of crops. These include rice (Oryza sativa), millets (Setaria spp.), beans (Vigna mungo; Vigna radiata), angled loofah (Luffa acutangula), yams (Dioscorea spp.), and taro (Colocasia esculenta) (7-9). Archaeological evidence from northern India documents these Neolithic crops from 7,000 BC onward, and by the early second millennium, there is evidence of Western crops arriving in India through trade, such as wheat, barley, lentils, grasspea, and peas (7).One of the crops domesticated in the Indo-Gangetic plain is cucumber, Cucumis sativus. Evidence for this consists in the occurrence there ...

Screening a variable germplasm collection of Cucumis melo L. for seedling resistance to Macrophomina phaseolina

“…melo is a highly diverse species, originally thought to originate in Africa. However, recent data suggests that melon may be of Asian origin (Sebastian et al 2010). Several recent papers dealing with the variability of the species confirm the previously proposed taxonomic subdivision into two subspecies, subsp melo and subsp agrestis (Pitrat 2008;Esteras et al 2013).…”

“…MELRIP 2007-2010(Esteras et al 2009 and was multiplied by the COMAV´s Cucurbits Breeding Group (www.comav.upv.es). Genotypes labelled with *were kindly provided by M. Pitrat.…”

Botanical Identification and Genetic Diversity in Melons From Family Farming in the State of Maranhão

“…Tropical Africa has been indicated as the centre of origin of the melon plant (BURGER et al, 2010), although conversely, Sebastian et al (2010) and John et al (2012) indicate that Asia is the centre of origin. Regardless of the place of origin of the melon plant, different centres of diversity have been formed (JOHN et al, 2012).…”

Seeds morpho-colourimetric analysis as complementary method to molecular characterization of melon diversity

“…The coefficient of determination (R 2 ) amounted to 0.849. The best hit of the Arabidopsis thaliana gene At4g39850 with the melon 480 Furthermore, whereas cucumber and melon are two cultivated crops 506 phylogenetically close related and surely deriving from the same ancestor 507 (Sebastian et al, 2010), C. colocynthis is a perennial (rarely annual) wild 508 species growing on sandy habitats in desert and semi-desert areas of North 509 Africa, the Near East and South-West Asia as far as India (Jeffrey, 2001). 510…”