Genetic variation, environment and demography intersect to shape Arabidopsis defense metabolite variation across Europe
- University of California, Davis, United States
- Gregor Mendel Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
- Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany
- University of Missouri, United States
Abstract
Plants produce diverse metabolites to cope with the challenges presented by complex and ever-changing environments. These challenges drive the diversification of specialized metabolites within and between plant species. However, we are just beginning to understand how frequently new alleles arise controlling specialized metabolite diversity and how the geographic distribution of these alleles may be structured by ecological and demographic pressures. Here we measure the variation in specialized metabolites across a population of 797 natural Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. We show a combination of geography, environmental parameters, demography, and different genetic processes all combine to influence the specific chemotypes and their distribution. This showed that causal loci in specialized metabolism contain frequent independently generated alleles with patterns suggesting potential within species convergence. This provides a new perspective about the complexity of the selective forces and mechanisms that shape the generation and distribution of allelic variation that may influence local adaptation.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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1,135 Genomes Reveal the Global Pattern of Polymorphism in Arabidopsis thalianaPMCID: PMC4949382, 1001 genomes.
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Phenotypic and genome-wide association with the local environment of ArabidopsisAraCLIM, https://github.com/CLIMtools/AraCLIM.
Article and author information
Author details
Daniel J Kliebenstein
Funding
National Science Foundation (MCB 1906486)
- Daniel J Kliebenstein
United States - Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (FI-560-2017)
- Ella Katz
- Daniel J Kliebenstein
National Science Foundation (IOS 1655810)
- Daniel J Kliebenstein
National Science Foundation (IOS 1754201)
- Ruthie Angelovici
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Katz 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.
