OPUS: Synthesizing field data in a genomic context to elucidate the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation

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How does a plant species persist, grow, and reproduce across a wide range of climates? What is the genetic basis of plant tolerance to climate variation? Addressing these questions is critical for foresters and crop scientists seeking to select appropriate varieties for high yield in different climates and assuring the nation's food supply. The answers are also important for predicting whether threatened plant populations can persist in the face of environmental change, or whether introduced species will become invasive in their new range. Understanding mechanisms of adaptation to variable environments is, moreover, a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (common name: thale cress) provides a unique opportunity to address this problem by synthesizing field measurements, genomic data, and geographic information, as outlined in this project. The results will be valuable to a wide range of scientists, from plant developmental biologists and population geneticists to plant ecologists and foresters. The project will provide novel interdisciplinary research training for a graduate student, and all of the data will be publicly released to provide a community resource for further analysis and synthesis. The research project will leverage data from field experiments with A. thaliana in which hundreds of genotypes originating in diverse climates across the native Eurasian range were grown together in common gardens in six sites across Eurasia and North America, along with known mutants in flowering time pathways. These unique phenotypic data will be integrated with newly available genomic data to investigate the genetic basis and adaptive evolution of complex life history traits such as flowering and phenotypic plasticity (the range of trait values expressed by the same genotype across different environments). The project will have three objectives: 1) Elucidate the genomic basis of complex life history traits and their plasticity in different natural seasonal environments. 2) Estimate natural selection on life history traits to understand how phenotypic plasticity contributes to plant performance in different climates. 3) Combine quantitative genetic and population genomic data to test for a signature of past adaptive divergence and climate adaptation in plastic life history traits. These synthetic analyses will be published in several interrelated scientific papers. Resulting insights will be further integrated with results of previous research in two major conceptual review papers.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.