CLAS Lecture Series: "Crop Domestication and Agricultural Development in Mesoamerica, and the Importance of the Extant Wild Crop Relatives"

The domestication of animals and plants represents one of the most significant events in the development of human society. As a two-way process, domesticated crops and humans rely on each other for their survival. In this lecture I will explore the main events underlying the domestication of crops in Mesoamerica: changes in agricultural systems and changes in culinary practices, and I will then discuss how we can overcome the loss of diversity through the conservation and use of the crop wild relatives.  

Born in Yucatan, Mexico, Jorge Berny is currently a Ph.D. student University of California – Davis in the lab of Paul Gepts. He received his undergraduate degree in Agronomy Engineering at the Instutito Tecnologico Agropercuario in Conkal, Yucatan, working on the collection and characterization of pepper landraces. After that, he studied the inheritance of post-harvest water loss in peppers in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Before starting his PhD at UC-Davis, he was an assistant researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agricolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP), carrying out research on genetic resources and cultivar development of peppers and beans. His current research is mainly focused on the genetic and physiological basis of drought adaptation in common beans through the study of domesticated beans and their wild relatives.