Ecological and functional 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 and mutations involved, to their effects on gene expression and phenotypes, to how those traits function in a realistic ecological context. One area to address this challenge is in the life history and developmental transition from vegetative growth to flowering, which is often under geographically variable selection due to climatic variation and seasonality. We have investigated this in the annual plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, which in addition to being the pre-eminent model system for plant biology, genomics, and genetics, is also in the same family as the important crop, Canola. The genetic and genomic resources for Arabidopsis are being increasingly leveraged for studies in the ecology, evolution, and genetics of adaptation.