Biology Department, Wesleyan University, 52 Lawn Avenue, Middletown, CT 06459, USA.
Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Sep 27;290(2007):20230824. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0824.
Through developmental plasticity, an individual organism integrates influences from its immediate environment with those due to the environment of its parents. While both effects on phenotypes are well documented, their relative impact has been little studied in natural systems, especially at the level of gene expression. We examined this issue in four genotypes of the annual plant by varying two key resources-light and soil moisture-in both generations. Transcriptomic analyses showed that the relative effects of parent and offspring environment on gene expression (i.e. the number of differentially expressed transcripts, DETs) varied both for the two types of resource stress and among genotypes. For light, immediate environment induced more DETs than parental environment for all genotypes, although the precise proportion of parental versus immediate DETs varied among genotypes. By contrast, the relative effect of soil moisture varied dramatically among genotypes, from 8-fold more DETs due to parental than immediate conditions to 10-fold fewer. These findings provide evidence at the transcriptomic level that the relative impacts of parental and immediate environment on the developing organism may depend on the environmental factor and vary strongly among genotypes, providing potential for the interplay of these developmental influences to evolve.
通过发育可塑性，个体生物将其直接环境的影响与来自其父母环境的影响整合在一起。尽管表型的这两种影响都有很好的记录，但在自然系统中，特别是在基因表达水平上，它们的相对影响很少被研究。我们通过在两代中改变两种关键资源——光和土壤湿度——来研究一年生植物中的四个基因型，以此来研究这个问题。转录组分析表明，父母和后代环境对基因表达（即差异表达转录本的数量，DETs）的相对影响因两种资源胁迫类型和基因型而异。对于光，所有基因型的直接环境诱导的 DETs 都多于亲本环境，尽管亲本与直接 DETs 的精确比例因基因型而异。相比之下，土壤湿度的相对影响在基因型之间差异很大，从由于亲本条件而导致的 8 倍以上的 DETs 到由于直接条件而导致的 10 倍以下的 DETs。这些发现提供了转录组水平的证据，表明父母和直接环境对发育中生物体的相对影响可能取决于环境因素，并且在基因型之间差异很大，为这些发育影响的相互作用进化提供了可能性。
