| I. Research Notes Origin and dispersion of wheats with special reference to peripheral diversity (a preliminary report)1) K. YAMASHITA Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama, Japan Introduction During the Technical Meeting on Plant Exploration and Introduction held by F.A.O. in 1961, I tried to say that VAVILOV's theory had become outdated as the leading philosophy for exploration, and some other new theory should be sought, but my opinion did not seem to draw much attention. Later, however. ZOHARY (1970) stated in his article in "Genetic Resources in Plants - their Exploration and Conservation (edited by FRANKEL and BENNETT, 1970) that "Vavilovian concept of centers of origin should be discarded or at least greatly revised", and HARLAN (1978) concluded in his speech at the Plenary Session of the XIV International Genetic Congress on N.I. VAVILOV Heritage in Modern Genetics, that "Additional collecting, biosystematic analyses, and archeological work have added much to our knowledge. On the other hand, the world of VAVILOV has all but vanished; old centers of diversity have disappeared under the impact of modern agriculture." World Centers of the Most Important Cultivated Plants VAVILOV (1951) stated that "in modern times, the distribution of plant species on the earth is not uniform. There are a number of regions which possess exceptionally large numbers of varieties. Southeastern, China, Indo-China, the Malay Archipelago, southwestern Asia, tropical Africa, the Cape regions, Abyssinia, Central America, South America, southern Mexico, countries along the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Near East possess extraordinary concentrations of plant varieties". In summarizing the works of numerous expeditions, VAVILOV located eight independent centers of origin of the world's most important cultivated plants. In VAVILOV's concept, the centers of diversity are referred to as centers of origin. |
| 1) A full-paper of this article will be published in Seiken Ziho, Report from the Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Nos.27,28,December,1978. |
| --> Next |