Most staple food crops were domesticated thousands of years ago through independent processes across different regions of the world. Studies of the history of such crops have been essential to our understanding of plant domestication as a process that started with the collection of wild material and continued with subsequent propagation, cultivation, and selection under human care. Domestication often involves a complex genetic structure with contributions from multiple founder populations, interspecific hybridization, chromosomal introgressions, and polyploidization events that occurred hundreds to thousands of years earlier. Such intricate origins complicate the systematic study of the sources of phenotypic variation.

The analysis of recently domesticated, non-traditional, non-model species, such as Sinningia speciosa (Gesneriaceae), can expand the knowledge that we have on phenotypic variation under domestication, and help us to comprehend modern patterns of plant domestication and to broaden our understanding of the general trends. S. speciosa is commonly known as the 'florist's gloxinia', and it has been cultivated for 200 years as an ornamental houseplant. In our genomic study of S. speciosa, we examined an extensive diversity panel consisting of 115 individuals that included different species in the genus, wild representatives, and cultivated accessions, as well as 150 individuals from an F2 segregating population. Our analyses revealed that all of the domesticated varieties are derived from a single founder population that originated in or near the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. We identified two loci associated with domesticated traits (flower symmetry and color) and did not detect any major hybridization or polyploidization events that could have contributed to the rapid increase in phenotypic diversity. Our findings, in conjunction with other features such as a small, low-complexity genome, ease of cultivation, and rapid generation time, makes this species an attractive model for the study of genomic variation under domestication.

Basic research on non-model organisms with low economic importance is uncommon but necessary to understand the world from a broader perspective. In such cases, reduced representation approaches like Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS) are efficient low-cost alternatives to whole genome resequencing. However, most of these technologies are subject to patent protection, licensing processes, and fees that constrain genomic research for small non-profit research organizations. We have designed a protocol to construct reduced representation libraries from genomic DNA. Our approach, called Targeted Amplification of Scattered Sites (TASS), deviates from the traditional digestion-ligation-amplification process that is the subject of intellectual property that protects most current methods. Instead, TASS relies on 1) targeting and duplicating scattered regions in the genome by annealing and expanding long tail primers with short annealing sites, and 2) amplifying these regions using primers that are complementary to the added overhangs. At the moment GBS is more consistent and delivers more variants than TASS. However, we have established a foundation on which further optimization can produce an accessible, easy to implement, high-throughput genotyping approach.