Posted on 05/28/2021 9:19:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
Just in time for picnic-table trivia, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rewrites the origins of domesticated watermelons.
Using DNA from greenhouse-grown plants representing all species and hundreds of varieties of watermelon, scientists discovered that watermelons most likely came from wild crop progenitors in northeast Africa.
The study corrects a 90-year-old mistake that lumped watermelons into the same category as the South African citron melon. Instead, researchers, including a first author now at Washington University in St. Louis, found that a Sudanese form with non-bitter whitish pulp, known as the Kordofan melon (C. lanatus), is the closest relative of domesticated watermelons.
The genetic research is consistent with newly interpreted Egyptian tomb paintings that suggest the watermelon may have been consumed in the Nile Valley as a dessert more than 4,000 years ago.
“Based on DNA, we found that watermelons as we know them today — with sweet, often red pulp that can be eaten raw — were genetically closest to wild forms from west Africa and northeast Africa,” said Susanne S. Renner, honorary professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
Renner is an evolutionary biologist who recently joined Washington University after 17 years working as a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, where she also served as the director of the Munich Botanical Garden and Munich herbarium.
Her lab has long focused on honey melons and cucumbers, but for the past 10 years she has turned to watermelons and bitter gourds.
The genetic information published in the new study — completed with colleagues from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Ithaca, New York; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London; and the University of Sheffield — could be useful for developing a more disease-resistant watermelon crop, Renner said.
“Today’s watermelon comes from a very small genetic stock and is highly susceptible to diseases and insect pests, including various mildews, other fungi, viruses, and nematodes [worms],” Renner said. “So far, we found variation in three disease resistance genes between the Kordofan melon and the domesticated watermelon. Breeders might use these and other insights from the genome.”
But some of the greatest takeaways from this study, Renner said, are related to the mobility of people and their cultural connections.
“It was the Egyptian tomb paintings that convinced me that the Egyptians were eating cold watermelon pulp,” Renner said. “Otherwise, why place those huge fruits on flat trays next to grapes and other sweet fruits?”
“Melons, cucumbers, and watermelons were domesticated several times” across human history, she said. “But to place these domestications in space and name is much more difficult than I thought 10 to 15 years ago. DNA from ancient seeds is already beginning to help.”
Reference: “A chromosome-level genome of a Kordofan melon illuminates the origin of domesticated watermelons” by Susanne S. Renner, Shan Wu, Oscar A. Pérez-Escobar, Martina V. Silber, Zhangjun Fei and Guillaume Chomicki, 24 May 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101486118
I don’t know where watermelons came from but I do know I grew up in a farming town where the biggest crop was watermelons and I pitched , picked and otherwise loaded watermelons for all of my youth, I was told it character building back then all I know it was hot and tiring work
I picked cucumbers.
They weigh less.....................
After watermelons it was picking tobacco followed by bailing hay to finish out the summer
I chopped cotton one spring.....................
I told this story, no-one else had ever heard it, at our family reunion and was amazed when one of the younger people found reference to it in the Dothan Eagle newspaper from the fifties on her phone.
Carthage...MO.
I did too for one day at my granddad's farm.
I quit the next day and went home.
I had a high-tech career in chip-making.
My favorite watermelon is the yellow flesh kind, but you never see them any more.
When I was a kid growing up in rural Mississippi, every summer a man would come around in his Ford pick-up selling peaches, one month, then watermelons the next month. I remember a BIG striped long melon was 50 cents!......................................
Would he cut out slices and offer it as a sample, to all the neighborhood kids?
Can you imagine moms letting their kids do that, today?
i never picked cotton.
but my mother did, and my sister did, and my brother did, and my daddy died young, working in the coal mines.
"I remember a BIG striped long melon was 50 cents!......................................"
We used to sell the big Black Diamond watermelon at the farmer's nmarket for ten cents each.
No, our nearest neighbor was a mile away, and the nearest kids were two miles...................
Fried chicken and watermelon, Gods gift on a summer afternoon.
And TITTSWORTH melons grown near Barry, Il, among the very best to be had.
.... And Corn on the cob!..................
Many women agree
I picked-up girls, more fun.
But they measured our picking by the bushel basket, and they wanted the small pickle sized gherkins.
I’d take my basket up to the truck to be counted and the man would take it and shake it down, and say more.................
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