Determining the scale at which variation in a single gene changes population yields
- Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany
- National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India
- Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica A C, Mexico
- University of Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract
Plant trait diversity is known to influence population yield, but the scale at which this happens remains unknown: divergent individuals might change yields of immediate neighbors (neighbor scale) or of plants across a population (population scale). We use Nicotiana attenuata plants silenced in mitogen-activated protein kinase 4 (irMPK4) – with low water-use efficiency (WUE) – to study the scale at which water-use traits alter intraspecific population yields. In the field and glasshouse, we observed overyielding in populations with low percentages of irMPK4 plants, unrelated to water-use phenotypes. Paired-plant experiments excluded the occurrence of overyielding effects at the neighbor scale. Experimentally altering field arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal associations by silencing the Sym-pathway gene NaCCaMK did not affect reproductive overyielding, implicating an effect independent of belowground AMF interactions. Additionally, micro-grafting experiments revealed dependence on shoot-expressed MPK4 for N. attenuata to vary its yield per neighbor presence. We find that variation in a single-gene, MPK4, is responsible for population overyielding through a mechanism, independent of irMPK4's WUE phenotype, at the aboveground, population scale.
Data availability
The datasets used in the final fittings of our linear (LM), generlized least-squares (GLS), or linear mixed effects (LME/R) models, from which statistical significances were extracted, are included as "Source Data" files in our submission. Each Source Data file refers to the figure in which the corresponding data/results are displayed.
Article and author information
Author details
Meredith C Schuman
Funding
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
- Erica McGale
- Henrique Valim
- Deepika Mittal
- Jesús Morales Jimenez
- Rayko Halitschke
- Meredith C Schuman
- Ian T Baldwin
European Research Council (Advanced Grant 293926)
- Henrique Valim
- Meredith C Schuman
- Ian T Baldwin
iDiv
- Erica McGale
- Henrique Valim
- Meredith C Schuman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, McGale et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,949
- views
-
- 272
- downloads
-
- 8
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Determining the scale at which variation in a single gene changes population yields
eLife 9:e53517.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.53517
