Abstract
Qat (
, Celastraceae) is a woody plant species cultivated for its stimulant alkaloids. Qat is important to the economy and culture in large regions of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen. Despite the importance of this species, the wild origins and dispersal of cultivars have only been described in often contradictory historical documents. We examined the wild origins, human-mediated dispersal, and genetic divergence of cultivated qat compared to wild qat.
We sampled 17 SSR markers and 1561 wild and cultivated individuals across the historical areas of qat cultivation.
On the basis of genetic structure inferred using Bayesian and nonparametric methods, two centers of origin in Kenya and one in Ethiopia were found for cultivated qat. The centers of origin in Ethiopia and northeast of Mt. Kenya are the primary sources of cultivated qat genotypes. Qat cultivated in Yemen is derived from Ethiopian genotypes rather than Yemeni wild populations. Cultivated qat with a wild Kenyan origin has not spread to Ethiopia or Yemen, whereas a small minority of qat cultivated in Kenya originated in Ethiopia. Hybrid genotypes with both Ethiopian and Kenyan parentage are present in northern Kenya.
Ethiopian cultivars have diverged from their wild relatives, whereas Kenyan qat has diverged less. This pattern of divergence could be caused by the extinction of the wild-source qat populations in Ethiopia due to deforestation, undersampling, and/or artificial selection for agronomically important traits.