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Molecular and morphological characterisation of the oldest Cucumis melo L. seeds found in the Western Mediterranean Basin

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Abstract

In 2008–2009, a rescue excavation uncovered an intact Late Bronze Age well in Sa Osa, Sardinia (Italy). The structure yielded a large number of waterlogged plant remains, of which a group of melon seeds (Cucumis melo L.) were some of the most remarkable. These seeds represent the earliest recorded remains of this taxon in the Western Mediterranean and are some of the oldest ever recorded. The plant remains were preserved in anoxic conditions and were found in a perfect state of conservation, making them ideal candidates for morphometric and molecular characterisation. A total of 96 parameters, measured using an automatic image analysis system, were specifically designed to evaluate the morphological features of 15 preserved whole seeds. DNA extraction from archaeological samples followed a procedure specifically set up to avoid any kind of contamination. A 123-SNP genotyping platform that had been validated previously was used. The morphological and molecular data of the archaeological seeds were successfully compared with those of a set of 179 accessions, including landraces, of feral and wild melons from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Both analyses confirmed that these ancient seeds did not belong to a wild melon, but instead to a cultivated one. This primitive melon could have belonged to a group of ancestral non-sweet or semi-sweet forms of chate, flexuosus, or ameri varieties, showing similarities to North African and Central Asian accessions. This finding is coherent with the reportedly important role of cucumber-like melons in the species’ diversification process and with the accepted role of the ameri group as the ancestors of the modern sweet varieties.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the NPGS (National Plant Germplasm System) of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) for providing several accessions from their collections. We wish to acknowledge M. Pitrat, who, within the MELRIP project, provided some of the melon accessions used in this study. We would also like to thank G. Attene, who made most of the Sardinian landraces and their images available to us, and F. Mascia, who provided the AmITS10 accession. We thank E. Martínez and G. Perpiñá Martín (COMAV) for their technical support with the melon collection.

We would like to express our gratitude to G. Venora for his support and for enabling us to use the laboratory at Stazione Consorziale Sperimentale di Granicoltura per la Sicilia.

Finally, we wish to thank E. Busó Sáez from the Epigenetic and Genotyping unit of the University of Valencia (Unitat Central d’Investigació en Medicina, University of Valencia) for his technical support. The language review of this paper was funded by the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain.

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Author notes

  1. Diego Sabato and Cristina Esteras contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GI Arqueobiología, Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigación Cientifica (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Diego Sabato & Leonor Peña-Chocarro

  2. Instituto de Conservación y Mejora de la Agrodiversidad Valenciana (COMAV), Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Cristina Esteras & Belén Picó

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e dell’Ambiente, Centro Conservazione Biodiversità (CCB), Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Oscar Grillo, Mariano Ucchesu & Gianluigi Bacchetta

  4. Stazione Consorziale Sperimentale di Granicoltura per la Sicilia (SSGS), Caltagirone, Italy

    Oscar Grillo

  5. Fondazione Edmundo Mach (FEM), Centro Ricerca e Innovazione, San Michele all’Adige (TN), Italy

    Carmen Leida

  6. Soprintendenza Archeologia della Sardegna, Cagliari, Italy

    Alessandro Usai

Authors
  1. Diego Sabato
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  2. Cristina Esteras
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  8. Gianluigi Bacchetta
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gianluigi Bacchetta or Belén Picó.

Electronic supplementary material

Online Resource 1

Seed lots detail. Code abbreviations: Ca = cantalupensis, In = inodorus, Am = ameri, Fx = flexuosus, Ch = chate, Du = dudaim, Co = conomon, Cn = chinensis, Mk = makuwa, Mo =momordica, Ct = chito, Ti = tibish, Ag = agrestis, La = indeterminate landraces. The third and fourth letter indicates the provenience according to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. (XLSX 31 kb)

Online Resource 2

SNP details: Information about the 123 SNP markers employed in the genotyping assay and summary statistic results generated in genotyping analysis with PowerMarker software. In Esteras et al. (2013) and Leida et al. (2015), markers were experimentally validated and further information is available. (XLSX 24 kb)

Online Resource 3

Genotyping results: Spreadsheet A Genotyping data of the entire melon collection. Spreadsheet B genotyping data expressed as s, a, m, and h for graphical genotype construction and related data such as percentages of heterozygosity or failed SNPs. Spreadsheet C Graphical genotypes obtained with GGT2 software for the entire collection ordered by the STRUCTURE population. Spreadsheet D Information about heterozygous loci for the archaeological sample. (XLSX 417 kb)

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Sabato, D., Esteras, C., Grillo, O. et al. Molecular and morphological characterisation of the oldest Cucumis melo L. seeds found in the Western Mediterranean Basin. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 11, 789–810 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-017-0560-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-017-0560-z

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