Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S102TN, UK.
Physiol Plant. 2011 Aug;142(4):352-60. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-3054.2011.01480.x. Epub 2011 May 24.
'The Holy Grail' of plant ecology is to uncover rules that associate species and traits with environmental constraints, community composition and subsequent ecosystem functioning. These aims have been crystallized in recent years within the context of global climate change and environmental pollution, increasing the urgency of the need to predict how vegetation will respond across spatial scales. We investigated whether genetic diversity is associated with the way in which phenotypic plasticity within plant populations is realized and whether this is related to genotype abundance. We used environmental metabolomics to demonstrate biochemical variation between co-occurring genotypes of Carex caryophyllea L. A novel combined metabolomic/functional trait analysis was used to test the functionality of this variation in governing plasticity to variation in edaphic conditions, with particular reference to metabolic pathways that play important roles in growth-related traits. We show that genetic diversity within a wild C. caryophyllea population relates to differences in metabolic composition and functional traits in response to soil nutrient variation, influencing genotype abundance within a community. Our findings highlight the vital role genetic diversity plays within a population in facilitating plant phenotypic plasticity and the potential usefulness of environmental metabolomics to future ecological studies.
“植物生态学圣杯”的目标是揭示物种和特征与环境约束、群落组成和随后的生态系统功能之间的联系。近年来，在全球气候变化和环境污染的背景下，这些目标更加明确，这增加了预测植被在空间尺度上如何响应的紧迫性。我们调查了遗传多样性是否与植物种群内表型可塑性的实现方式有关，以及这是否与基因型丰度有关。我们使用环境代谢组学来证明 Carex caryophyllea L 的共存基因型之间的生化变异，并用一种新的代谢组学/功能性状分析来测试这种变异在控制对土壤条件变化的可塑性方面的功能，特别是在对与生长相关的性状起重要作用的代谢途径方面。我们表明，野生 C. caryophyllea 种群内的遗传多样性与对土壤养分变化的代谢组成和功能性状的差异有关，从而影响群落内的基因型丰度。我们的研究结果强调了遗传多样性在促进植物表型可塑性方面在种群中所起的重要作用，以及环境代谢组学在未来生态研究中的潜在用途。
