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Researchers found that cocoa trees first appeared 3,600 years ago
A team badyzing the genomes of their trees was attributed to a "single domestication event".
The researchers, founded by the chocolate firm Mars, badyzed "the prince of cocoas", a rare and tasty variant known as Criollo, which was the first to be domesticated.
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Cocoa, photographed, was domesticated in Central America 3,600 years ago, but comes from the Amazon basin, near the current border between the southern Colombia and northern Ecuador
WHAT IS COCOA?
Cocoa is a bean-shaped seed whose cocoa is made of cocoa butter and chocolate
The seeds are contained in large oval pods that grow on the trunk of the tree.
Almost 4,600,000 tons of cocoa are produced each year. The study, which involved 18 scientists from 11 different institutions, also revealed that cocoa domestication ended up selecting taste, disease resistance and the stimulant theobromine.
However, this has been done at the expense of conserving genes that have reduced crop yield.
They discovered that it had been domesticated in Central America 3,600 years ago, but came from the Amazon Basin, near the modern border of southern Colombia. and northern Ecuador, from an ancient germplasm known as Curaray.
At the time, the tree population comprised between 437 and 2,674 individual trees, of which about 738.
According to Cornejo, it was probably introduced to Central America by traders. This discovery could lead to a better understanding of how humans have moved across the Americas.
"This evidence allows us to better understand how humans move and establish in America," said Omar Cornejo, a population geneticist at Washington State University and author main article on the study in communication biology, an open access journal published by Nature's editors.
Cocoa is a bean-like seed, from which cocoa, cocoa butter, and chocolate are made
"This is important in itself, because it gives us a time to ask questions that may be more delicate: how long did it take to make a good cocoa? What was the strength of the domestication process? How many plants were needed to domesticate a tree? "
The era of domestication 3,600 years ago is consistent with traces of theobromine found in Olmec pottery and large-scale badyzes of ancient and modern human DNA that roughly locate the colonization of the Americas 13,000 years ago
The findings of the study could help identify the genes that give rise to specific traits that breeders can emphasize, including yield.
that we would like is a way to combine plants of high productivity populations – such as Iquitos – plants of Criollo origin, while retaining all those desirable traits that make Criollo cocoa the best in the world, "said Cornejo
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