Understanding plant drought adaptation through genetic trade-offs with Arabidopsis thaliana
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With consistently rising global temperatures and lower rainfall, drought conditions are becoming increasingly severe, and plants are compelled to either migrate, adapt, or face extinction. Two well-known adaptation strategies to drought are escape, where plants shift their phenology (e.g. earlier flowering) to have important life history events occur before the drought, and avoidance, where plants utilize mechanisms to improve their water use efficiency (WUE) (e.g. stomatal regulation). Previous studies have found that early flowering plants have a lower WUE than late-flowering plants, and plants under drought conditions typically select for escape. However, unpublished data from Expósito-Alonso et al. 2019 found that Arabidopsis thaliana from a dry climate of origin and grown in drought conditions trends towards having a higher fitness with both early flowering and high WUE. To expand on this study, we used a CRISPR-mediated knockout of the early flowering Flowering Locus C (FLC) gene. We grew 47 A. thaliana and 47 mutated lines in three different drought conditions. To evaluate the escape-avoidance trade-off, we took several phenology and fitness measurements as well as using WUE and flowering time data from previous studies done on the same ecotypes of A. thaliana. Our results show that, in well-watered conditions, earlier-flowering founder plants had a higher fitness than late-flowering plants, and late-flowering plants had greater WUE, as expected. In well-watered conditions, plants with the flc KO had a significant positive correlation between fitness and WUE, as well as between fitness and flowering time. Therefore, we found that there could be selection for both early flowering and high WUE when flowering time is held constant, breaking the escape-avoidance trade-off. Ultimately, understanding drought strategies and their trade-offs in the natural world will help inform predictions in plant adaptations and distributions under worsening climate change.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | May 5, 2022; May 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Kieschnick, Clara |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Expósito-Alonso, Moisés |
| Thesis advisor | Bergmann, Dominique |
| Thesis advisor | Fukami, Tadashi |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Biology |
Subjects
| Subject | Biology |
|---|---|
| Subject | Adaptation (Biology) |
| Subject | Plants, Flowering of > Flowering time |
| Subject | Avoidance |
| Subject | Escape |
| Subject | Water Use Efficiency |
| Subject | Climatic changes > Research |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Kieschnick, C. and Expósito-Alonso, M. (2022). Understanding plant drought adaptation through genetic trade-offs with Arabidopsis thaliana. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/ps075yq4745
Collection
Undergraduate Theses, Department of Biology, 2021-2022
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- Contact
- ckiesch@stanford.edu
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