Abstract
PROF. N. I. VAVILOV, whose work is mentioned above, was a pupil of Bateson at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, London, in 1913 and 1914. Profiting by the unexampled opportunities afforded by the Soviet Government, he began in 1919 to study the natural variation of the ancestral species of cultivated plants. His special method was to use the geographical distribution of particular gene variations in determining the centre of their diversity, which he presumed to be the site of their origin. He applied this method to all the principal crop plants, leading expeditions to all parts of the world. This enabled him to infer the centres of origin of these plants. The most interesting example of this method concerns the wheats. The cultivated forms were already known to fall into two inter-sterile groups, the tetraploids like T. durum, T. turgidum, T. polonicum, and the hexaploids like T. vulgare and T. compactum. Vavilov found that the hexaploids had arisen from a Central Asiatic centre, while the tetraploids had arisen from an entirely different centre in North Africa, hence the association of the two groups of wheat with different lines of human cultural development.
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Prof. N. I. Vavilov. Nature 139, 143 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139143a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139143a0