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

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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.