UK Research Studies Shaping Plant Genome

The plant's genome is characterized by immense duplication and deletions, one of the strategies on how they adjust to extreme environmental changes and biotic stresses during its growth and development. University of Kentucky' (UK) College of Agriculture Seth DeBolt investigated how much duplications and deletions in the plant genome is influenced by natural variation using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

Arabidopsis plants were sprayed with salicylic acid – a plant hormone plants use for defense, at different concentrations and reference temperatures. Plants were selected every generation for those which have the most seeds, in a span of five generations. For each of the five lineages, three completely random sibling plants were compared to the reference genome lineage. DeBolt found that copy number variations are stably incorporated into the progenies and some 400 genes were changed, suggesting that plants are probably gene duplicators and deleters.

"It's the way robustness is built into a population, that it has enough variation to adapt to change," he said. "We have to be cautious in that this is only one step showing adaption, but I think it shows a surprising result."

For details of the study, see http://www.kentuckyagconnection.com/story-state.php?Id=487&yr=2010