Ecological and functional genomics of plant adaptation

生物学的主要目标之一是描述理解适应性进化的多层次组织：从基因和突变涉及，他们对基因表达和表型的影响，这些特征如何在现实的生态环境中发挥作用。解决这一挑战的一个领域是从营养生长到开花的生活史和发育过渡，由于气候变化和季节性，这通常是在地理上可变的选择。我们已经在一年生植物拟南芥中研究了这一点，拟南芥除了是植物生物学，基因组学和遗传学的杰出模型系统之外，还与重要作物油菜属于同一家族。拟南芥的遗传和基因组资源正越来越多地用于生态学、进化和适应遗传学的研究。

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.