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.
-
1,135 Genomes Reveal the Global Pattern of Polymorphism in Arabidopsis thalianaPMCID: PMC4949382, 1001 genomes.
-
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.
Metrics
-
- 4,061
- views
-
- 514
- downloads
-
- 45
- 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)
Genetic variation, environment and demography intersect to shape Arabidopsis defense metabolite variation across Europe
eLife 10:e67784.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67784
Further reading
-
- Ecology
Global change is causing unprecedented degradation of the Earth’s biological systems and thus undermining human prosperity. Past practices have focused either on monitoring biodiversity decline or mitigating ecosystem services degradation. Missing, but critically needed, are management approaches that monitor and restore species interaction networks, thus bridging existing practices. Our overall aim here is to lay the foundations of a framework for developing network management, defined here as the study, monitoring, and management of species interaction networks. We review theory and empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of species interaction networks for the provisioning of ecosystem services, how human impacts on those networks lead to network rewiring that underlies ecosystem service degradation, and then turn to case studies showing how network management has effectively mitigated such effects or aided in network restoration. We also examine how emerging technologies for data acquisition and analysis are providing new opportunities for monitoring species interactions and discuss the opportunities and challenges of developing effective network management. In summary, we propose that network management provides key mechanistic knowledge on ecosystem degradation that links species- to ecosystem-level responses to global change, and that emerging technological tools offer the opportunity to accelerate its widespread adoption.
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Eurasia has undergone substantial tectonic, geological, and climatic changes throughout the Cenozoic, primarily associated with tectonic plate collisions and a global cooling trend. The evolution of present-day biodiversity unfolded in this dynamic environment, characterised by intricate interactions of abiotic factors. However, comprehensive, large-scale reconstructions illustrating the extent of these influences are lacking. We reconstructed the evolutionary history of the freshwater fish family Nemacheilidae across Eurasia and spanning most of the Cenozoic on the base of 471 specimens representing 279 species and 37 genera plus outgroup samples. Molecular phylogeny using six genes uncovered six major clades within the family, along with numerous unresolved taxonomic issues. Dating of cladogenetic events and ancestral range estimation traced the origin of Nemacheilidae to Indochina around 48 mya. Subsequently, one branch of Nemacheilidae colonised eastern, central, and northern Asia, as well as Europe, while another branch expanded into the Burmese region, the Indian subcontinent, the Near East, and northeast Africa. These expansions were facilitated by tectonic connections, favourable climatic conditions, and orogenic processes. Conversely, aridification emerged as the primary cause of extinction events. Our study marks the first comprehensive reconstruction of the evolution of Eurasian freshwater biodiversity on a continental scale and across deep geological time.
