Let’s break bread…
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Wheat feeds billions globally. But where did this journey begin?
Enter Fei Lu and team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They analyzed the DNA of over seven hundred wheat types, from wild grasses to modern crops.
By matching shared genes, they traced wheat’s family tree and migration map.
And? Bread wheat first appeared along the southwest coast of the Caspian Sea. About six thousand years ago, it journeyed across Eurasia. Over time, its genes wandered, mingled, and toughened up to survive every soil and climate.
But as human diets changed, wheat’s wild cousins sharply declined.
So give us this day our daily bread… but cut the crust off mine!
Reference: Zhao, X., Guo, Y., Kang, L. et al. Population genomics unravels the Holocene history of bread wheat and its relatives. Nat. Plants 9, 403–419 (2023). https://doi.org/10.10