Description du projet
Aider les plantes à «s’exprimer» pour s’adapter rapidement au changement climatique
Le changement climatique est une expérience naturelle qui offre un regard sur la capacité des plantes à évoluer et à s’adapter pour survivre. Cette capacité naît sous l’effet de changements dans le génome et dans l’expression des gènes et intègre, de façon inhérente, un compte à rebours. Les plantes doivent non seulement s’adapter, mais elles doivent le faire rapidement, ou du moins à l’échelle temporelle du changement climatique. Étant donné que les gènes évoluent beaucoup plus lentement que leurs profils d’expression, la modification de leur transcription peut s’avérer un outil important pour une adaptation rapide. Le projet TxnEvoClim, financé par l’UE, tire parti d’une grande base de données contenant des informations sur la variabilité naturelle ainsi que des données et des expériences de projet nouvellement disponibles, afin de mieux comprendre et d’exploiter le potentiel d’adaptation des plantes à un environnement en pleine mutation.
Objectif
Differences in gene expression play a key role in generating the phenotypic variability needed for adaptation. During evolution, the coding sequence of genes evolves on average much slower than their expression patterns, thus transcriptional regulation can be especially important for rapid adaptation to a new environment. Climate is a major factor for plant adaptation, and both the dispersal of a plant from its native origin as well as climate change will often lower its fitness. Thus, understanding how gene expression patterns are modified to facilitate life in adverse climates would shed light on the trade-offs limiting adaptation. Studying how evolution has shaped plant transcriptomes so that these plants can grow in different ecological niches and their potential to adapt to a changing climate requires a large base of natural variability information. This has recently been accumulated for Arabidopsis thaliana, a model for genetic and evolutionary studies. In the proposed project I will use genomic and transcriptomic data from the A. thaliana 1001 Genomes Project, new measurements of gene expression under water deprivation, as well as newly available data on gene-regulation and field fitness, to define how gene expression is shaped by climate and the genetic potential to adapt to new environments. I will address the following: (1) In natural populations, how do gene expression patterns of individuals correspond to the particular adapted climates? (2) What is the genetic basis for the transcript differences and how is it reflected in modifications to the transcriptional network? (3) Can knowledge of climate-transcript variation relationships be predictive of individual strains more likely to survive in a new climate? As climate is changing due to global warming, the understanding of mechanisms by which plants adapt to climate becomes even more important in agriculture and in natural populations, and this project aims to illuminate the role of a central mechanism.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
80539 Munchen
Allemagne