The plant Arabidopsis thaliana serves not only as a model organism for fundamental molecular and cellular processes, but has also greatly advanced our understanding of the origins and consequences of intraspecific genome variation. We have produced a detailed variation map from 1135 high-quality resequenced genomes representing the global population in its native Eurasian and North African range, and in recently colonized North America.
We identified relict populations that continue to inhabit ancestral habitats, primarily in the Iberian Peninsula. They have mixed with a lineage that has spread to northern latitudes from an unknown glacial refugium and is now found in a much broader range of habitats.