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Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system for the study of evolutionary questions

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Weigel,  D       
Department Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Weigel, D. (2012). Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system for the study of evolutionary questions. Talk presented at 23rd International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR 2012). Wien, Austria. 2012-07-03 - 2012-07-07.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000C-AC7A-A
Abstract
We are investigating three main questions of evolution: (i) How, and how frequently, do new genetic variants arise? (ii) Why do some variants increase in frequency? (iii) And why are some combinations of variants incompatible with each other? To this end, we are employing bottom-up and top-down approaches that rely heavily on large-scale sequencing. Whole-genome sequencing supports a detailed description of the pan-genome of A. thaliana (http://1001genomes.org; Schneeberger et al., PNAS 108:10249 [2011]; Cao et al., Nat Genet 43:956 [2011]), it reveals mutational biases shaping the genome (Ossowski et al. Science 327:92 [2010]), and it allows for rapid mapping of genes with major phenotypic effects (Schneeberger et al., Nat Methods 6:550 [2009]). We have also investigated spontaneous epigenetic variation. We discovered that spontaneous methylome changes are much more biased than DNA mutations. Furthermore, reversions are frequent, suggesting that most epialleles are unlikely to contribute to long-term evolution (Becker et al., Nature 480:245). A major interest in the lab is the analysis of fitness tradeoffs in immunity. A few years ago, we developed A. thaliana as a model for the study of hybrid necrosis, a widespread syndrome of hybrid failure due to adverse autoimmune reactions (Bomblies et al., PLoS Biol 5:e236 [2007]). Several of the causal loci are immune receptor genes, members of the most polymorphic gene family in plants. While most hybrid necrosis systems involve two loci, autoimmunity can also be caused by inter-allelic interactions at a single locus that is involved in a major fitness tradeoff between growth and pathogen resistance in inbred strains (Todesco et al., Nature 465:632 [2010]). We propose that evolutionary divergence of pathogen recognition systems can potentially result in reproductive isolation and subsequent speciation, not only by random genetic drift, but also by divergent selection due to different pathogen environments.