Ecophysiological and molecular mechanisms of weed seed bank persistence

杂草是现代农业的主要威胁。例如，黑种草被认为是欧洲农业中最具破坏性的禾谷类杂草（1）。农业杂草种子休眠是影响田间杂草出苗规律的关键因素。它与种子活力和持久性一起影响杂草种子库的行为，这对设计有效的杂草控制策略至关重要。黑种草仅通过种子繁殖（2）。这种种子固有休眠的解除导致在生长季节出现两个出苗高峰：秋季出现一个高峰，春季出现一个小高峰，分别影响冬季和春季谷物的建立（3）。这一现象在田间试验中得到了很好的描述（1，4，5），这些试验提供了对黑种草出苗的农业生态学描述，然而，支撑黑种草和其他重要杂草种子休眠、生存力和持久性的实施和解除的生态生理学和分子机制在很大程度上仍然未知。本项目旨在研究这些机制，为更有效的涌现模型和控制策略的发展提供信息。已经确定温度在休眠释放中具有重要作用，并且使用RNA测序方法鉴定了参与该过程的候选基因（霍洛威等人，2019年，正在编写），拟议的跨学科项目将以这项工作为基础。

Weeds are a major threat to modern agriculture. For example, blackgrass is considered the most destructive cereal weed in European agriculture (1). Seed dormancy in agricultural weeds is the key factor regulating weed emergence patterns in the field. Together with seed viability and persistence, it affects the behaviour of the weed seed bank, which is of vital importance to designing effective weed control strategies. Blackgrass is propagated solely by seed (2). Release of the innate dormancy of this seed results in two peaks of seedling emergence during the growing season: a major peak in autumn and a minor peak in spring, affecting the establishment of winter and spring cereals respectively (3). This phenomenon is well described in field experiments (1,4,5) that provide an agro-ecological description of blackgrass seedling emergence, however the ecophysiological and molecular mechanisms underpinning the enforcement and release of seed dormancy, viability and persistence in blackgrass and other important weeds remain largely unknown. This project aims to investigate these mechanisms for informing the development of more effective emergence models and control strategies. Having established that temperature has an important role in the dormancy release and with identified candidate genes involved in this process using an RNAseq approach (Holloway et al., 2019, in prep.), the proposed interdisciplinary project would build on this work.