The origin and dispersal of buckwheat

Buckwheat, which soba noodles is made from, originated from a wild species that is distributed in southwest China, around Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet. We are trying to understand when, where, and how it originated and then spread across the world and came to Japan. To do so, we are using genomic data of wild samples from China and cultivated samples from various parts of the world. I will give a brief introduction about buckwheat, explain what we already know about its origin and dispersal, and show a bit of our results. I will also explain the significance of studying "domestication", that is, the process that plants/animals that humans currently use originated from their ancestral wild species.

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