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   Location:Home > Research > Research Progress
Home-garden populations capable of maintaining genetic diversity
Author: Gao Jie
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Update time: 2012-04-09
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Home-garden is a traditional agroforestry system which is cultivated with a mixture of annuals, perennials and trees, and is a common feature in the majority of tropical countries. In Xishuangbanna, a tropical area of southwestern China, Dai people have tended home-garden for over 1,000 years; they collect a wide range of plants for the purpose of food, medicine, culture and religion from the area surrounding their villages, and then transplant them in their home-gardens for later use. Feathery leaf shoots of A. pennata are consumed as a popular wild vegetable in Xishuangbanna, adjacent Thailand and Laos.

Dr. Li Qiaoming and her students of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) took Acacia pennata, a widely distributed diploid species in tropical and subtropical Southeast Asia, as a case study to explore the value of conserving genetic variation of home-garden.

Using polymorphic microsatellite DNA markers, the researchers aimed to (1) quantify the amount of genetic variation in wild and home-garden populations of A. pennata (2) compare the structure and differentiation of genetic variation in wild and home-garden populations (3) evaluate the effectiveness of home gardening systems in the maintenance of genetic resources.

The researchers collected leaves of A. pennata from home-gardens and wild populations at seven sites across Xishuangbanna. They compared the microsatelite DNA diversity in planted populations with that in geographically nearby wild populations with similar population size.

The study data showed no significant difference of allele richness between wild and home-garden populations. Bottleneck analysis showed that in seven of the studied places, three of those sites have showed sign of bottleneck events in both wild and planted population. Analysis showed that home-garden populations were not separated from their geographically approximate wild populations. It is therefore likely that planted populations of A. pennata at studied sites have been originated primarily from nearby wild populations. Re-introducing material from multiple wild populations to home-gardens may also be an ongoing process.

Their study result that high level of genetic diversity of A. pennata maintained in traditional Dai home-gardens indicates that home-gardens are of potential significance for biodiversity conservation in human-dominated systems.

The study entitled “Traditional home-garden conserving genetic diversity: a case study of Acacia pennata in southwest China” has been published online in Conservation Genetics, DOI:10.1007/s10592-012-0338-x

Traditional Dai Home-garden in Xishuangbanna (Image by GAO Jie)

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Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan 666303, China
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