Ecological genomics of plant adaptation

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One of biology's major goals is to describe understand adaptive evolution on multiple levels of organization: from the genes involved, their expression, and the traits they affect upto the ecological forces that produces natural selection, and how this is manifested in a geographic landscape where climate and seasonality vary. One promising area to address this challenge is in the transition to flowering in the plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. This species, which is in the same family as the important Canadian crop plant canola, has several advantages: the resources of a genomic model organism can be leveraged with studies of experimental ecology. Arabidopsis thaliana has invaded North America, and appears to show evidence of rapid, adaptive evolution. However, the genetic mechanisms of this evolution and the ecological forces leading to it remain to be confirmed. I will investigate whether clines in flowering time seen in the invaded range (North America) are in fact the result of adaptation, and the genetic and ecological mechanisms that might have created these patterns. Combining genetic mapping, gene expression studies, and manipulative ecological experiments, we will allow a comprehensive investigation of rapid evolution after invasion. My specific aims are to: (1) Confirm the ecological mechanisms of adaptation after invasion, (2) Use next generation sequencing technology to rapidly map the genetic basis of adaptation, (3) Evaluate the contribution of expression variation to adaptation, and (4) Examine the microevolution, in the field, of confirmed flowering time genes that interact epistatically. The proposed work will support training several HQP in the rapidly expanding areas of ecological and evolutionary genomics, and advance our knowledge of flowering time, plant reproduction, and the genetics of invasive species because it evaluates the roles of molecular genetic and environmental variation in shaping complex traits. The results are likely to be of great importance in understanding adaptive responses of species to biological invasion and climate change.