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CreonAntigone
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Registered: 05/30/21
Posts: 2,875
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Cultivation creating new species: can it happen with fungi?
#28336370 - 05/27/23 12:10 AM (7 months, 28 days ago) |
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In the history of domestication, there are several examples in which a strategy of domestication created an entirely new species from an older one.
For example with grains, all grain species were cultivated first from a wild plant that is now considered a different species. Echinochloa cruz-gali is a wild weed grass, but Echinochloa esculenta is a cultivated grass for edible seed. Similar barley, Hordeum vulgare, was cultivated from the wild Hordeum spontaneum as soon as 10,000 years ago.
This suggests new species can be forged by cultivation and selective breeding, though perhaps it maybe take thousands of years.
I want to ask if this is possible with fungi, and if it has ever happened with those fungi that have been cultivated, for example any mushrooms that seem to have formed as an offshoot from an original mushroom through breeding (perhaps before sophisticated cultivation of the modern era, selection would be choosing certain kinds of fruits and trying to encourage them to come up in nature by transplanting mycelium.)
How long would it take to create a new species via a concerted effort of cultivation? Could it be accomplished in 100 years? More like a thousand, ten thousand? Clearly possible at least since the time agriculture developed if humans were able to create new species from so many grasses.
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Kizzle
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Re: Cultivation creating new species: can it happen with fungi? [Re: CreonAntigone]
#28337654 - 05/27/23 11:28 PM (7 months, 27 days ago) |
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Domestication doesn't create new species. Only a lot of time and isolation can do that. Domesticated plants and animals that still have a wild counterpart can and occasionally do interbreed with them.
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CreonAntigone
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Re: Cultivation creating new species: can it happen with fungi? [Re: Kizzle]
#28337705 - 05/28/23 12:48 AM (7 months, 27 days ago) |
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Quote:
Kizzle said: Domestication doesn't create new species. Only a lot of time and isolation can do that. Domesticated plants and animals that still have a wild counterpart can and occasionally do interbreed with them.
Sure they can breed sometimes, but they maintain as different species and that's how scientists classify them. I'm just going by what the biologists say.
Teosinte, the native ancestor to corn, has adaptations that can allow it to reject corn fertilization. Still some crossbreeding happens but it is distinct enough to be a different species.
Edited by CreonAntigone (05/28/23 09:55 AM)
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Sasha Emblance
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Registered: 05/26/23
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Re: Cultivation creating new species: can it happen with fungi? [Re: CreonAntigone] 1
#28339482 - 05/29/23 01:37 PM (7 months, 26 days ago) |
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Defining what a species is is a surprisingly slippery concept. Still, generally, we can say new species arise from a mating incompatibility between two populations resulting from a lineage-splitting event. The combination of these pushes it beyond phenotypic expression and into the realm of speciation.
Theoretically, if, in your breeding program, you purposefully selected for traits that reduced breeding compatibility with the ancestral population, your influence could be the lineage-splitting event.
In practice it’s very unlikely to progress quickly enough to be viable, even with new technology for genomic prediction and marker-assisted selection; this is because genes relating to reproduction are usually very highly conserved. You would also have to maintain viability in your breeding population, meaning that selecting for mutations that are reproductively incompatible with the ancestral population would likely also make them in compatible with your breeding population.
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