Author : Päivi Leinonen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789514296765
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (967 download)
Book Synopsis Local Adaptation and Its Genetic Basis in Arabidopsis Lyrata by : Päivi Leinonen
Download or read book Local Adaptation and Its Genetic Basis in Arabidopsis Lyrata written by Päivi Leinonen and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Local adaptation is important evolutionary process leading to adaptive population differentiation. Currently, examining its genetic basis is a major goal of evolutionary and ecological genetics. In my thesis I studied local adaptation and its genetic basis in populations of a perennial outcrossing model plant Arabidopsis lyrata by combining common garden experiments at the native field sites and in controlled conditions with quantitative trait locus mapping. Estimates of fitness in the field both at the level of multiple components as well as hierarchical total fitness showed that populations of A. lyrata were locally adapted. The studied populations were also phenotypically differentiated in ecologically relevant traits. Different components of fitness were important for the advantage of the locals depending on the environment. Local alleles were associated with high fitness in the field, suggesting that differing directional selection pressures have been involved in phenotypic differentiation. Mostly different genomic regions governed local adaptation in different environments, but the results also suggested that some of these regions could involve rarely documented fitness tradeoffs (antagonistic pleiotropy). Loci governing flowering time differentiation differed between the studied environments, highlighting the need to conduct experiments both in the wild and in controlled conditions. In contrast to most existing studies, F2 hybrids in general had surprisingly high fitness at one study site, largely due to beneficial dominance effects at loci governing survival in that environment. In addition to nuclear genes, cytoplasmic genomes also were found to have a role in local adaptation"--Abstract page.