Quantifying the Genome-wide Influence of Human Selection on Leaf Morphology and Amino Acid Metabolism in Cole Crops

这一行动为NSF国家植物基因组计划2017财年生物学博士后研究奖学金提供了资金。该奖学金支持在东道主实验室为该研究员制定的研究和培训计划，该研究员还提出了扩大生物学参与度的计划。该奖学金的主办机构是密苏里大学，赞助科学家是蒂莫西·贝辛格博士、J·克里斯·皮尔斯和露西·安杰洛维奇博士。甘蓝属的驯化十字花科蔬菜，俗称油菜，是从野生芥菜中挑选出来的，具有广泛的形态和营养属性。尽管油菜品种之间存在极大的生理差异，但人们对油菜作物的遗传多样性和发育权衡程度知之甚少。令人感兴趣的是，选择较大的营养器官如何影响氨基酸代谢，氨基酸代谢对叶片的营养质量和种子发芽能力至关重要，以确保持续的进化和改进。该项目使用多学科方法来解决关于驯化如何影响甘蓝属多样性小组中的遗传多样性和氨基酸代谢的基本问题。培训目标包括数量遗传学、群体遗传学、生物信息学和代谢组学。更广泛的影响包括指导学生、客座演讲和探索食物系统与作物驯化之间的联系的外联活动。有必要将驯化研究从谷物扩大到更多具有全球和营养重要性的作物。在这个项目中，这位研究员将通过测试选择的基因组签名，描述以前的瓶颈和扩展，研究叶片和种子之间氨基酸代谢的权衡，并确定这些特征的基因组区域，来研究甘蓝的驯化和种群历史。这将包括对甘蓝多样性小组的重新测序，叶片和种子中氨基酸组成的网络分析，叶片形态的定量评估，以及对所观察到的表型的结构变异的识别。这项工作产生的所有数据、脚本和方法都将存放在开放获取的储存库中。

This action funds an NSF National Plant Genome Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2017. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The host institution for the fellowship is the University of Missouri and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Timothy Beissinger, J. Chris Pires, and Ruthie Angelovici. Domesticated cruciferous vegetables in Brassica oleracea, commonly known as cole crops, were selected from wild mustard to encompass a wide range of morphological and nutritional attributes. Despite extreme physical differences among cultivars, little is known about the extent of genetic diversity and developmental trade-offs in cole crops. Of interest is how selection for larger vegetative organs has influenced amino acid metabolism, which is important in leaves for human nutritional quality and for seed germinability to ensure continued evolution and improvement. This project uses a multi-disciplinary approach to address fundamental questions regarding how domestication has influenced genetic diversity and amino acid metabolism in a diversity panel of B. oleracea. Training objectives include quantitative genetics, population genetics, bioinformatics, and metabolomics. Broader impacts include mentoring of students, guest lecturing, and outreach events exploring the connections between food systems and crop domestication. There is need to expand domestication research beyond the cereals to additional crops with global and nutritional importance. In this project, the fellow will study domestication and demographic history in B. oleracea by testing for genomic signatures of selection, characterizing previous bottlenecks and expansions, studying trade-offs in amino acid metabolism between leaves and seeds, and identifying genomic regions of interest for these traits. This will include the resequencing of a diversity panel of B. oleracea, network analysis of amino acid composition in leaves and seeds, quantitative assessment of leaf morphology, and identification of the structural variation contributing to the observed phenotypes. All data, scripts, and methodologies produced from this work will be deposited in open-access repositories.