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SFB 1644:  Phenotypic plasticity in plants – Mechanisms, constraints and evolution

Subject Area Biology
Term since 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512328399
 
Plants have colonised almost every habitat on earth. They are the dominant organismal kingdom by biomass, and all animal life depends on them. A major feature that has enabled this success is the remarkable ability of plants to adjust their growth and development to different environments. The ability of a given genotype to generate different phenotypes in different environments is termed phenotypic plasticity. Such plasticity is a universal feature of life, and understanding its molecular basis and evolution is a fundamental goal in biology. This understanding has major implications for predicting plant responses to a changing climate and environment and for accelerating plant breeding tailored to specific environments. With our CRC, we propose an interdisciplinary research program to tackle this key challenge across multiple scales of biological organization. Genotypes can differ in how they respond to the same environmental cue, for example because of molecular differences in their environmental response machinery. Thus, the plasticity of a focal trait to an environmental cue is itself a heritable trait. At the same time, phenotypic plasticity is not unlimited, but is associated with costs and constraints. One important source of such constraints are genetic correlations between plastic responses of different traits. The magnitude and shape of plastic responses can be described by the reaction norm that relates the trait values of a given genotype to the values of the environmental cue. Previous work has both demonstrated ample variation in reaction-norm shapes, and elucidated the molecular mechanisms underlying plasticity to particular cues in model genotypes. However, these two fields of research are largely unconnected and we still know very little about what makes different genotypes respond differently to the same environmental cue? To address this overarching question, our CRC will tackle the following four common questions across the individual projects: (i) What is the genetic and molecular basis of variation in phenotypic plasticity of key traits to environmental cues in natural populations? (ii) How do the genes that influence the reaction-norm shape of a trait act mechanistically, and to what extent are these molecular mechanisms shared across taxa? (iii) Are there genetic correlations between the extents of phenotypic plasticity for different focal traits that constrain plasticity? (iv) Which type of natural selection acts on phenotypic plasticity of a focal trait, and is there evidence for recent positive selection on plasticity? To achieve these goals, our consortium will integrate genetics, cell and developmental biology, physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, computational biology and mathematical modeling. As a result, we will obtain a step-change in our understanding of phenotypic plasticity as an evolving trait of critical importance to the fate of plant populations in the face of environmental change.
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres
International Connection USA

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Applicant Institution Universität Potsdam
 
 

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