Format: ORAL

Manica Balant 1,2, Daniel Vitales 1, Zoltn Barina 3, Branko Dolinar 4, Lin Fu 5, Tiangang Gao 6,7, Teresa Garnatje 1,8, Airy Gras 1,2, Muhammad Q. Hayat 9, Marine Oganesian 10, Jaume Pellicer 1,11, Alireza S. Salami 12,13, Alexey P. Seregin 14, Nina Stepanyan-Gandilyan 10, Nusrat Sultana 15, Shagdar Tsooj 16, Magsar Urgamal 16, Joan Valls 2,17, Zhiqiang Wang 18, Lisa Pokorny 1,19

1 Institut Botànic de Barcelona (IBB, CSIC-CMCNB), Barcelona, Spain 2 Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain 3 WWF, Budapest, Hungary 4 Botanical Society of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia 5 South China Botanical Garden (SCBG-CAS), Guangzhou, P. R. China 6 Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 7 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 8 Jardí Botànic Marimurtra-Fundació Carl Faust, Blanes, Spain 9 National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan 10 Institute of Botany (IB NAS RA), Yerevan, Armenia 11 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, UK 12 Industrial and Medical Cannabis Research Institute (IMCRI), Tehran, Iran 13 University of Tehran, Teheran, Iran 14 Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia 15 Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh 16 Botanic Garden and Research Institute (BGRI MAS), Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 17 Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Spain 18 Chengdu University, Chengdu, China 19 Real Jardín Botánico (RJB-CSIC), Madrid, Spain

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 ?9-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.