Meiotic adaptation to whole genome duplication in Arabidopsis arenosa

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The information to make an organism is encoded in DNA. DNA is organized into individual chromosomes so that it can be accessed, copied and easily moved. In nature, especially in the plant kingdom, organisms may experience duplication of all the chromosomes. This is often advantageous as the organisms may become bigger and better adapted to challenging environments. In fact, humans have been subconsciously selecting plants with extra sets of chromosomes, such as bread wheat, sugar cane, cotton, coffee, strawberry, banana, oil seed rape and potato. This has produced larger, more nutritious crops through a completely natural process. However, upon producing an organism with a doubled set of chromosomes there is an immediate problem. As the doubled sets of chromosomes may be identical or very similar, they get tangled up during a particular stage of sexual reproduction called meiosis. This causes infertility and limits the potential for generating novel, high yielding crops. However, evolution has repeatedly solved this problem, by innovating or selecting advantageous natural variation. We are now in a position to understand how natural variants of certain genes can ensure that chromosomes do not tangle after doubling, to produce fertile plants. The aim of this work is to functionally characterize these natural gene variants in the model plant Arabidopsis. We will use chromosome doubling and halving techniques as well as molecular and cell biology approaches so that we can understand the mechanism behind chromosome stabilization and translate this knowledge to produce bigger, high yielding crop plants. A second aspect of this project is to determine whether the factors controlling chromosome stabilization are the same in closely related species to Arabidopsis. This will reveal whether the same or different factors may be targeted, which will be of academic and agronomic interest.