ИСТИНА

Cannabis sativa L. has been used by humans for millennia, providing important and versatile services in traditional medicine, for ritual purposes and to produce food and fibre. The process of domestication and subsequent dispersal by humans has resulted in the development of various landraces and cultivars, exhibiting a wide array of morphological features, phytochemical aspects, and an intricate genetic structure marked by numerous hybridisation events. Unravelling the origin of this plant and determining the existence of genuinely wild populations pose considerable challenges due to its complex nature. In this study, we relied on the Angiosperms353 probe set to investigate the genetic origins of over 90 accessions, encompassing a spectrum of wild/feral and landrace representatives. Phylogenomic and population genomics workflows were implemented to analyse the data generated. Both workflows consistently showed East Mongolian accessions as a distinct group, robustly supported as sister to all other sampled accessions. The remaining accessions segregate into two main clades, aligning with the geographical distribution and the classification proposed in earlier studies for the putative subspecies Cannabis sativa subsp. indica and Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa. The first clade encompasses accessions from China to Iran and southwards into the Indian subcontinent, with a dispersal to West Africa. These latter Indian and African accessions consist of landraces characterized by high Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content. The second clade is itself divided into two subclades. A Caucasian-Mediterranean clade and a mostly Turanian-Russian clade that also includes some Eastern European accessions. These distribution patterns are consistent with known routes of trade and migrations of human populations, in agreement with previous studies.