About Dioscorea rotundata

White Guinea yam (Dioscorea rotundata Poir.) is a common staple food that has contributed enormously to the subsistence and socio-cultural life of millions of people principally in West and Central Africa. Belonging to the monocotyledon the Dioscorea genus, under the family Dioscoreaceae, there are about 450 known species mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The entire Genus is characterised by the occurrence of separate male and female plants (dioecy), a rare trait in angiosperms that has limited efficient breeding, and D. rotundata can be either diploid or triploid, with a haploid chromosome number of 20. The reference for D. rotundata comes from a diploid individual of unknown sex with an assembled genome size of 579 Mb.

Taxonomy ID 55577

Data source Genetics and Breeding, Iwate Biotechnology Research Center

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