SHORT COMMUNICATION Entrelac ¸ado, a rare maize race conserved in Southwestern Amazonia Flaviane Malaquias Costa . Natalia Carolina de Almeida Silva . Rafael Vidal . Charles Roland Clement . Rubana Palhares Alves . Paola Cortez Bianchini . Moacir Haverroth . Fabio de Oliveira Freitas . Elizabeth Ann Veasey Received: 14 March 2020 / Accepted: 30 August 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract Maize (Zea mays spp. mays L.) is the major domesticated cereal of the Americas and is of great relevance for global food security. For a long time, Amazonia represented an empty space in the racial distribution maps of this species, due to the lack of collections and the idea that locally developed races became extinct during European colonization. How- ever, a native race had been described in Brazilian Amazonia, the Entrelac ¸ado race, and a new study placed Amazonia on the map again, with a proposal for a center of diversification in Southwestern Ama- zonia. We prospected maize in the Brazilian states of Acre and Rondo ˆnia (Southwestern Brazilian Amazo- nia) and found floury landraces belonging to the Entrelac ¸ado race, rare in existing collections and often considered extinct in the field. We collected indige- nous and local names, general and specific uses for Entrelac ¸ado, and characterized these accessions to compare them with other Brazilian floury maize races, based on data from the literature. Floury maize from the Southwest formed a coherent group in the cluster analysis, which grouped with Entrelac ¸ado from the literature, confirming its identification and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-020-01008-0) con- tains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. F. M. Costa (&) Á E. A. Veasey (&) Department of Genetics, Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, University of Sa ˜o Paulo, Piracicaba, SP CEP 13418-900, Brazil e-mail: flavianemcosta@hotmail.com E. A. Veasey e-mail: eaveasey@usp.br N. C. de Almeida Silva Technological University of Uruguay, 97000 Durazno, Uruguay R. Vidal Faculty of Agronomy, University of the Republic, 12900 Montevideo, Uruguay C. R. Clement Á R. P. Alves National Research Institute of Amazonia, Manaus, AM CEP 69067-375, Brazil P. C. Bianchini Embrapa Semi-Arid, Petrolina, PE CEP 56302-970, Brazil M. Haverroth Embrapa Acre, Rio Branco, AC CEP 69900-970, Brazil F. de Oliveira Freitas Embrapa Genetic Resources and Biotechnology, Brası ´lia, DF CEP 70770-901, Brazil 123 Genet Resour Crop Evol https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-020-01008-0