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

英国未来将如何提高农业生产力？农业生产的一个主要成就是人工培育矮化植物。由于体积小，这些植物在与高大的竞争对手的竞争中表现不佳。然而，当种植在一起时，矮化的植物对作物产量有很大的促进作用。这个成功的故事有时被称为“逆转”自然选择的工作，以产生高大强壮的竞争对手。另一方面，进化生物学家明白，自然选择有时会偏爱“弱小”的竞争者。这可能发生在邻居有遗传关系时（例如，兄弟姐妹），所以对邻居好意味着你把你的基因传递下去，尽管是间接的。我的工作是基于这样一个想法，即自然界中的植物通常与亲戚一起生长，因此这些植物可能具有许多未知的特性，这些特性有利于邻居并促进群体生产力。在牛津大学，我将搜索一个模式植物物种（拟南芥，卷心菜和芥菜的亲戚）的许多不同变体，旨在发现这些合作植物性状及其遗传基础。在找到最合作的类型后，我将确定这些自然变异相对于目前农业中使用的矮化植物的生产力。随着英国对可持续农业的需求不断增长，我想知道大自然的工作是否可以被利用来帮助满足需求。

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.