“Leveraging genomic resources of model species for the assessment of phylogeny in wild and domesticated lentil”

Advances in comparative genomics have provided significant opportunities for analysis of genetic diversity in species with limited genomic resources, such as the genus Lens. Medicago truncatula expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were aligned with the Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequence to identify conserved exon sequences and splice sites in the ESTs. Conserved primers (CPs) based on M. truncatula EST sequences flanking one or more introns were then designed. A total of 22% of the CPs produced PCR amplicons in lentil and were used to sequence amplicons in 175 wild and 133 domesticated lentil accessions.  Analysis of the sequences confirmed that L. nigricans and L. ervoides are well-defined species at the DNA sequence level. L. culinaris subsp. odemensis, L. culinaris subsp. tomentosus, and L. lamottei may constitute a single taxon pending verification with crossability experiments. L. culinaris subsp. orientalis is the progenitor of domesticated lentil, Lens culinaris subsp. culinaris (as proposed before), but a more specific area of origin can be suggested in southern Turkey. We were also able to detect the divergence, following domestication, of the domesticated gene pool into overlapping large-seeded (megasperma) and small-seeded (microsperma) groups. Lentil domestication led to a loss of genetic diversity of approximately 40%.  The approach followed in this research has allowed us to rapidly exploit sequence information from model plant species for the study of genetic diversity of a crop such as lentil with limited genomic resources. (From Alo et al. 2011)