BIO220H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Effective Population Size, Crop Yield, Fertile Crescent

• School: UTSG
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIO220H1
• Professor: John Stinchcombe

Document Summary

We have a relatively limited number of food crops, and a limited set of species to meet our nutritional requirements. Rice, maize, and wheat make up about 60% of our food requirements. Their ancestors have a huge variety (genetic variation) The cradle of civilization is the fertile crescent founder crops. So many crops and domestication of crops. The founder crops include: barely, wheat, grapes, lentils, peas, chickpeas, olives, dates, flax. The crops that we have now have been selected, and so the diversity is reduced. Highly diverse species should be more prone to domestication because there is a higher set to domesticate and choose from. What happens during or after domestication: bottleneck: only few genotypes are chosen for cultivation reduction in variety, strong artifical selection: we are choosing the best crops. We are selecting on timing of the germination, the seed size and the nutrition and we choose the best subset of the seeds.