The natural genetic basis of cooperation in Arabidopsis: implications for crop improvement

英国将如何提高未来的农业生产率？农业生产的主要成功之一是人工培育矮生植物。由于规模较小，这些工厂在与更高的竞争对手竞争时表现不佳。然而，当生长在一起时，矮小的植物对作物生产力有很大的促进作用。这个成功的故事有时被说成是自然选择产生高大健壮的竞争者的工作的“逆转”。另一方面，进化生物学家明白，自然选择有时会偏袒“弱”的竞争者。当邻居在基因上有血缘关系(例如兄弟姐妹)时就会发生这种情况，所以对邻居好意味着你会把你的基因传递下去，尽管是间接的。我的工作是基于这样一种观点，即自然界中的植物经常与亲戚一起生长，因此这些植物可能具有许多未知的特征，这些特征有利于邻居并提高群体生产力。在牛津大学，我将搜索一种模式植物物种(拟南芥，卷心菜和芥菜的近亲)的许多不同变体，旨在发现这些合作植物的特征及其遗传基础。在找到最具合作性的类型之后，我将确定这些自然变异相对于目前用于农业的矮化植物的产量。随着英国对可持续农业需求的增长，我想知道大自然的工作能否被利用来帮助满足需求。

How will the UK increase its future agricultural productivity? One of the major successes in agricultural production involved the artificial creation of dwarfed plants. On account of their small size, these plants did poorly against taller competitors. When grown together, however, dwarfed plants provided a major boost to crop productivity. This success story is sometimes told as 'reversal' of natural selection's work to produce tall and robust competitors. On the other hand, evolutionary biologists understand that natural selection will sometimes favour 'weak' competitors. This can occur when neighbours are genetically related (e.g., siblings), so that being nice to a neighbour means that you pass your genes on, albeit indirectly. My work is based on the idea that plants in nature often grow with relatives, and so these plants may have many unknown traits that benefit neighbours and promote group productivity. At the University of Oxford, I will search through many different variants of a model plant species (Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of cabbage and mustard), aiming to discover these cooperative plant traits and their genetic basis. After finding the most cooperative types, I will determine how productive these natural variants are relative to the dwarfed plants currently used in agriculture. As the UK's need for sustainable agriculture grows, I want to know if Nature's work can be exploited to help meet the demand.