SG: Collaborative Research: Measuring intra-locus conflict across the genome in a dioecious plant

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Understanding natural selection is an important scientific objective that furthers our understanding of the natural world and impacts human health and welfare. Modern agriculture is based on the adoption of selection as a method to improve crops. Furthermore, dealing with emerging diseases and antibiotic resistance is helped by understanding how natural selection operates. This project examines the fact that the strength and direction of natural selection routinely differs between males and females of a species. The consequence of this selection depends on whether the same genes are expressed in males and females. The research team will explore selection on males and females using field studies, genomic analyses, and statistical modeling using Silene latifolia, an herbaceous flowering plant. This plant is an ideal model for this research given extensive prior work demonstrating important phenotypic and genetic differences between males and females. Workshops to the scientific community will be presented on how to write scientific articles and the genomic techniques used in this study. Outreach to the general public will include a project involving high-school students in Kansas in genetic research, and a demonstration on flowers at a community-level science festival in Indiana.The research team will collect phenotypic and fitness measurements on all individuals within a S. latifolia population from Virginia, and then interrogate these individuals, and their progeny, at Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome. The combination of phenotypic, genotypic, and fitness data will allow the researchers to determine if selection is evident at the scale of individual loci and if it differs between males and females. This species has heteromorphic sex chromosomes (males are XY), and a genome-wide characterization of selection will enable a test of the prediction that selection should differ between autosomes and sex chromosomes. While there is a great body of work measuring natural selection in plant populations, this experiment will provide unprecedented detail on a typically hidden component of selection, the differential success of male plants in siring. Finally, the project will allow both undergraduate and graduate students to engage in and learn field techniques, laboratory methodology, and bioinformatics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.