Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna BioCenter, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Elife. 2022 Jul 29;11:e77913. doi: 10.7554/eLife.77913.
We investigated early vegetative growth of natural accessions in cold, nonfreezing temperatures, similar to temperatures these plants naturally encounter in fall at northern latitudes. We found that accessions from northern latitudes produced larger seedlings than accessions from southern latitudes, partly as a result of larger seed size. However, their subsequent vegetative growth when exposed to colder temperatures was slower. The difference was too large to be explained by random population differentiation, and is thus suggestive of local adaptation, a notion that is further supported by substantial transcriptome and metabolome changes in northern accessions. We hypothesize that the reduced growth of northern accessions is an adaptive response and a consequence of reallocating resources toward cold acclimation and winter survival.
我们研究了自然居群在寒冷、非冻结温度下的早期营养生长，这些温度类似于这些植物在北方秋季自然遇到的温度。我们发现，来自北方的居群产生的幼苗比来自南方的居群大，部分原因是种子更大。然而，当它们暴露在更冷的温度下时，它们随后的营养生长会变慢。这种差异大到不能用随机的种群分化来解释，因此暗示了对环境的适应，这一观点进一步得到了北方居群中大量转录组和代谢组变化的支持。我们假设北方居群生长缓慢是一种适应性反应，是资源重新分配以适应寒冷和冬季生存的结果。
