The plums grown today for dried prunes likely originated from hybrid crosses and artificial selection by early agrarian societies, a genetic analysis shows. Chris Dardick from the US Department of Agriculture’s Appalachian Fruit Research Laboratory in Kearneysville, West Virginia, and coworkers sequenced more than 100,000 single DNA letters scattered across the genomes of 405 different samples of the European plum (Prunus domestica). The plants clustered genetically into four groups that…
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