Jagoda, J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2020

Plasticity of the primary metabolome in 241 cold grown Arabidopsis thaliana accessions and its relation to natural habitat temperature

In the present study, 241 natural accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana were grown under two different temperature regimes, 16 {degrees}C and 6 {degrees}C, and growth parameters were recorded together with metabolite profiles to investigate the natural variation in metabolic responses and growth rates. Primary metabolism and growth rates of accessions significantly differed between accessions and both growth conditions. Relative growth rates showed high correlations to specific metabolite pools. Metabolic distances based on whole metabolite profiles were built from principal component centroids between both growth setups. Genomic prediction using ridge-regression best linear unbiased prediction (rrBLUP) revealed a significant prediction accuracy of metabolite profiles in both conditions and metabolic distances, which suggests a tight relationship between genome and primary metabolome. GWAS analysis revealed significantly associated SNPs for a number of metabolites, especially for fumarate metabolism at low temperature. A highly significant correlation was observed between metabolic distances and maximum temperature in the original growth habitat between January and March. Inverse data-driven modelling revealed that metabolic pathway regulation and metabolic reaction elasticities distinguish accessions originating from warm and cold growth habitats.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2020

Gradual evolution of allopolyploidy in Arabidopsis suecica

The majority of diploid organisms have polyploid ancestors. The evolutionary process of polyploidization (and subsequent re-diploidization) is poorly understood, but has frequently been conjectured to involve some form of "genome shock" -- partly inspired by studies in crops, where polyploidy has been linked to major genomic changes such as genome reorganization and subgenome expression dominance. It is unclear, however, whether such dramatic changes would be characteristic of natural polyploidization, or whether they are a product of domestication. Here, we study polyploidization in Arabidopsis suecica (n = 13), a post-glacial allopolyploid species formed via hybridization of A. thaliana (n = 5) and A. arenosa (n = 8). We generated a chromosome-level genome assembly of A. suecica and complemented it with polymorphism and transcriptome data from multiple individuals of all species. Despite a divergence of [~]6 Mya between the two ancestral species and appreciable differences in their genome composition, we see no evidence of a genome shock: the A. suecica genome is highly colinear with the ancestral genomes, there is no subgenome dominance in expression, and transposable element dynamics appear to be stable. We do, however, find strong evidence for changes suggesting gradual adaptation to polyploidy. In particular, the A. thaliana subgenome shows upregulation of meiosis-related genes, possibly in order to prevent aneuploidy and undesirable homeologous exchanges that are frequently observed in experimentally generated A. suecica, and the A. arenosa subgenome shows upregulation of cyto-nuclear related processes, possibly in response to the new cytoplasmic environment of A. suecica, with plastids maternally inherited from A. thaliana.

evolutionary biology↗