Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, USA; Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Curr Biol. 2020 Feb 24;30(4):R180-R189. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.003.
All plants must allocate limited resources to survival, growth, and reproduction. In natural species, allocation strategies reflect trade-offs between survivorship risk and subsequent fitness benefits and are therefore central to a species' ecology. Artificial selection on allocation has generated high-yielding crops that often invest the bare minimum in defense or longevity. Ecological, genetic, and evolutionary analyses of plant life history - particularly with respect to longevity and resource allocation along an axis from annual to perennial species - provides a framework to evaluate trade-offs in plant-environment interactions in natural and managed systems. Recent efforts to develop new model plant systems for research and to increase agricultural resilience and efficiency by developing herbaceous perennial crops motivates our critical assessment of traditional assumptions regarding differences between annual and perennial plant species. Here, we review our present understanding of the genetic basis of physiological, developmental, and anatomical differences in wild and crop species and reach two broad conclusions. First, that perenniality and annuality should be considered syndromes comprised of many interacting traits, and that elucidating the genetic basis of these traits is required to assess models of evolution and to develop successful breeding strategies. Modern phenomic and biotechnology tools will facilitate these enquiries. Second, many classic assumptions about the difference between the two syndromes are supported by limited evidence. Throughout this Review, we highlight key knowledge gaps in the proximate and ultimate mechanisms driving life history variation, and suggest empirical approaches to parameterize trade-offs and to make progress in this critical area of direct relevance to ecology and plant performance in a changing world.
所有植物都必须将有限的资源分配用于生存、生长和繁殖。在自然物种中，分配策略反映了生存风险与后续适应度收益之间的权衡，因此是物种生态学的核心。对分配的人工选择产生了高产量的作物，这些作物通常在防御或长寿方面投入了最低限度的投资。对植物生活史的生态、遗传和进化分析——特别是在从一年生到多年生物种的轴线上的长寿和资源分配方面——为评估自然和管理系统中植物-环境相互作用的权衡提供了一个框架。最近，人们努力开发新的模式植物系统进行研究，并通过开发草本多年生作物来提高农业的弹性和效率，这促使我们对一年生和多年生植物物种之间的传统假设进行批判性评估。在这里，我们回顾了我们目前对野生和作物物种在生理、发育和解剖差异方面的遗传基础的理解，并得出了两个广泛的结论。首先，多年生性和一年生性应该被认为是由许多相互作用的特征组成的综合征，阐明这些特征的遗传基础对于评估进化模型和开发成功的育种策略是必要的。现代表型和生物技术工具将促进这些研究。其次，许多关于这两种综合征之间差异的经典假设得到了有限证据的支持。在整篇综述中，我们强调了驱动生活史变异的近因和终极机制的关键知识空白，并提出了经验方法来参数化权衡，并在这个与生态学和植物在不断变化的世界中的表现直接相关的关键领域取得进展。
