Genomic basis for drought resistance in European beech forests threatened by climate change
- Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Germany
- Institute for Human Genetics, University Medical Center, Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany
- Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Germany
- Department of Biology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
- Hochschule Geisenheim University, Germany
- Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Germany
- LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics, Germany
- Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, Germany
Abstract
In the course of global climate change, central Europe is experiencing more frequent and prolonged periods of drought. The drought years 2018 and 2019 affected European beeches (Fagus sylvatica L.) differently: even in the same stand, drought damaged trees neighboured healthy trees, suggesting that the genotype rather than the environment was responsible for this conspicuous pattern. We used this natural experiment to study the genomic basis of drought resistance with Pool-GWAS. Contrasting the extreme phenotypes identified 106 significantly associated SNPs throughout the genome. Most annotated genes with associated SNPs (>70%) were previously implicated in the drought reaction of plants. Non-synonymous substitutions led either to a functional amino acid exchange or premature termination. A SNP-assay with 70 loci allowed predicting drought phenotype in 98.6% of a validation sample of 92 trees. Drought resistance in European beech is a moderately polygenic trait that should respond well to natural selection, selective management, and breeding.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited at ENA under project code PRJEB41889.The genome assembly including the annotation is available under the Access. No. PRJNA450822.
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Genomic basis of drought resistance in Fagus sylvatica by PoolGWASEuropean Nucleotide Archive, PRJEB40079.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
There was no particular funding for this work; all work was financed by regular budgets
Reviewing Editor
- Meredith C Schuman, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Version history
- Received: December 7, 2020
- Accepted: June 7, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 16, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 8, 2021 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: June 30, 2023 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2021, Pfenninger 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.
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Genomic basis for drought resistance in European beech forests threatened by climate change
eLife 10:e65532.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65532
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