Monitoring gene flow between wild relatives and landraces of common bean in Costa Rica

Introduction Gene flow is the spread of genetic material among populations and may constitute an important evolutionary force to create genetic variability. We study possible cases of gene flow in accessions of Phaseolus vulgaris L. collected in the Central Valley of Costa Rica (Araya et al. 2001), The present study aims to establish the movement of genes in the complex wild/weed/cultivated of this crop model as a result of cross pollinations. We focus on intemiediate, weedy forms in order to (1) find evidence of gene flow, and (2) quantify its importance and direction.