Ecophysiological and molecular mechanisms of weed seed bank persistence

杂草是现代农业的主要威胁。例如，黑草被认为是欧洲农业中最具破坏性的杂草(1)。农用杂草种子休眠是影响杂草田间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。黑草完全由种子繁殖(2)。种子自然休眠的解除导致了生长季节出苗的两个高峰期：秋季出现一个大高峰，春季出现一个小高峰，分别影响冬粮和春粮的形成。这一现象在田间试验(1，4，5)中得到了很好的描述，这些试验为黑草幼苗的出苗提供了农业生态学描述，但支持黑草和其他重要杂草种子休眠的加强和解除、存活和持久性的生态生理和分子机制仍然很不清楚。该项目旨在研究这些机制，以便为开发更有效的紧急情况模型和控制策略提供信息。由于确定了温度在休眠解除过程中具有重要作用，并利用RNAseq方法确定了参与这一过程的候选基因(Holloway等人，2019年在准备工作中)，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.