While there has been progress in our understanding of the origin and history of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, a unified perspective is still lacking on where and how major crops were domesticated in the region. Here, we investigated the domestication of African yam (Dioscorea rotundata), a key crop in early African agriculture. Using whole-genome resequencing and statistical models, we show that cultivated yam was domesticated from a forest species. We infer that the expansion of African yam agriculture started in the Niger River basin. This result, alongside with the origins of African rice and pearl millet, supports the hypothesis that the vicinity of the Niger River was a major cradle of African agriculture.

A large set of 26 new reference transcriptomes dedicated to comparative population genomics in crops and wild relativesThe International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) believes that open access contributes to its mission of reducing hunger and poverty, and improving human nutrition in the tropics through research aimed at increasing the eco-efficiency of agriculture.CIAT is committed to creating and sharing knowledge and information openly and globally. We do this through collaborative research as well as through the open sharing of our data, tools, and publications. Citation:Sarah For more information, please contact CIAT Library at CIAT-Library@cgiar.org. Accepted ArticleThis article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.12587 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. AbstractWe produced a unique large dataset of reference transcriptomes to obtain new knowledge about the evolution of plant genomes and crop domestication. For this purpose we validated a RNA-Seq data assembly protocol to perform comparative population genomics. For the validation, we assessed and compared the quality of de novo Illumina short-read assemblies using data from two crops for which an annotated reference genome was available, namely grapevine and sorghum. We used the same protocol for the release of 26 new transcriptomes of crop plants and wild relatives, including still understudied crops such as yam, pearl millet and fonio. The species list has a wide taxonomic representation with the inclusion of 15 monocots and 11eudicots. All contigs were annotated using BLAST, prot4EST, and Blast2GO. A strong originality of the dataset is that each crop is associated with close relative species, which will permit whole genome comparative evolutionary studies between crops and their wild related species. This large resource will thus serve research communities working on both crops and model organisms. All the data are available at