Saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, is extracted from the flowers of Crocus sativus. But where and when was it first grown? A new study found it
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himSaffron has been cultivated for thousands of years in the Mediterranean regions but when for the first time this plant was "domesticated" by man it was not known exactly before the results of this study.
Domestic saffron is now grown all over the world and the precious spice that is obtained and used in cooking, in perfumes and as a dye, has a value per kilo between 1.300 and 10.000 dollars!
In a new research, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, a team of experts from the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany), after comparing the evidence coming from the art world with that of genetics, came to a unambiguous conclusion regarding the origin of saffron.
As Ludwig Mann, one of the study's lead authors and a graduate student at the German university, stated:
Both ancient works of art and genetics point to the Greece of the Bronze Age, around 1700 BC or earlier, as the origin of the domestication of saffron.
The Crocus genus has about 250 species that grow in different areas of the world: from southern and central Europe to North Africa and up to western China. But there is a substantial difference between all the others and domestic saffron, the latter does not grow in nature and can be propagated asexually only with the help of man, by dividing its underground "corms", storage organs similar to stems. A process that was first described by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus between the XNUMXth and XNUMXrd centuries BC
Finding out where and when saffron was first domesticated is not easy: the species is difficult to genetically study, because it has three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two and a large genome containing a high percentage of repetitive DNA sequence. - said Seyyedeh-Sanam Kazemi-Shahandashti, another author of the study.
But the works of art analyzed, which represent the cultivation of saffron, also helped a lot.
@Frontiers in Plant Science
The authors argue that those of the Minoan civilization of ancient Greece are probably the most ancient to represent domestic saffron. For example, the dense patches of crocus flowers on the 'Saffron Gatherers' fresco on the island of Santorini (dating from around 1600 BC) suggest that cultivation was already taking place at that time.
The location of the origin of saffron cultivation in Bronze Age Greece agrees with the results of some genetic studies from 2019, which showed that C. cartwrightianus, found only in mainland Greece and Crete, is the relative wilder than saffron.
The authors believe that modern saffron, with its three genomes, arose naturally from the wild, exclusively from C. cartwrightianus crossed with other varieties. Modern domestic saffron would later be cultivated by the Bronze Age Greeks for its superior qualities as a spice.
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Fonte: Frontiers in Plant Science
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