Tracing the Holocene hybrid origin of cultivated walnut in southwestern China
Jie Liu, Hai-Ling Qi, Peng-Zhen Fan, Chu-Mei Liu, Zeng-Yuan Wu, Ya-Huang Luo, Richard I. Milne, Raees Khan, Lian-Ming Gao, Yue-Hua Wang, Moses C. Wambulwa, Robabeh Shahi Shavvon, De-Zhu Li · 2026
Read Tracing the Holocene hybrid origin of cultivated walnut in southwestern China by Jie Liu, Hai-Ling Qi, Peng-Zhen Fan, Chu-Mei Liu, Zeng-Yuan Wu, Ya-Huang Luo, Richard I. Milne, Raees Khan, Lian-Ming Gao, Yue-Hua Wang, Moses C. Wambulwa, Robabeh Shahi Shavvon, De-Zhu Li (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13253123.txt.
Description
Jie Liu and twelve co-authors published this study in 2026. It traces the ancestry of cultivated walnuts in southwestern China. Two walnut species grow side by side there, and farmers' trees looked like they might carry blood from both.
The team genotyped nearly three thousand trees at thirty-one marker sites and read over seven hundred chloroplast genomes, the maternally inherited line. The wild species proved more diverse than the cultivated one. Around the Sichuan Basin, the two had hybridized heavily, forming two regional hybrid groups with mixed parentage but chloroplasts entirely from the cultivated species. Computer reconstructions dated the first mixing to the early Holocene and a second round to the middle Holocene. The authors propose the hybrids arose before farming reached the region, helped by southward human migrations. The story shows how people reshaped a crop's genetics long before modern breeding.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jie Liu, Hai-Ling Qi, Peng-Zhen Fan, Chu-Mei Liu, Zeng-Yuan Wu, Ya-Huang Luo, Richard I. Milne, Raees Khan, Lian-Ming Gao, Yue-Hua Wang, Moses C. Wambulwa, Robabeh Shahi Shavvon, De-Zhu Li |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 59 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |