Les complexes d'espèces rassemblant des formes sauvages et cultivées offrent une opportunité unique de disséquer les déterminants de l'adaptation à une échelle de temps courte (depuis la domestication) et à une échelle de temps plus longue (sélection naturelle dans les populations sauvages). Nous avons étudié ici le complexe formé par le maïs cultivé, Zea mays ssp. mays, et les formes sauvages apparentées, les téosintes des sous-espèces Zea mays ssp. mexicana et ssp. parviglumis. Le maïs a été domestiqué à partir de cette dernière au Mexique, il y a environ 9 000 ans. Nous avons tout d’abord étudié l'histoire démographique du maïs en utilisant des données de re-séquençage (24-53x) de 31 variétés locales de maïs couvrant sa distribution précolombienne. Nous avons confirmé l’existence d’un goulot d'étranglement pendant la domestication, entraînant une réduction importante de la taille effective de la population, ainsi que des effets de goulots en série au cours de sa dissémination post-domestication. Les effets indésirables de ces événements démographiques se traduisent par une augmentation des allèles délétères chez le maïs en comparaison des formes sauvages, particulièrement marquée chez les maïs andins. De façon intéressante, nous avons détecté des introgressions de la sous-espèce mexicana vers les maïs cultivés des régions montagneuses du Mexique, du Guatemala et du sud-ouest des États-Unis, qui réduisent la prévalence des allèles délétères. Nous avons ensuite étudié les changements plastiques dans l'expression des gènes en comparant les transcriptomes de maïs et de téosintes dans les conditions climatiques actuelles et des conditions proches de celles trouvées au moment de la domestication – basse température et faible teneur en CO₂. Nous avons identifié plus de 2000 locus qui présentent une expression différentielle entre conditions chez les téosintes, mais dont l’expression ne varie pas chez les maïs. Ces résultats suggèrent une plus grande plasticité de réponse chez les téosintes, appuyée par l’observation de changements plus substantiels dans les réseaux de co-expression chez les téosintes comparativement au maïs. Nous avons ensuite recherché les signatures génomiques de l'adaptation locale dans six populations naturelles de la sous-espèce parviglumis (20-25x). Nous avons identifié grâce à scans génomiques, des locus présentant des traces de balayages sélectifs forts et doux. Le chevauchement faible de ces locus entre les populations, indique une forte adaptation locale. Ainsi, l’adaptation génétique à une échelle géographique réduite, les introgressions répétées entre formes sauvages et domestiques et l'assimilation génétique qui « cimente » les phénotypes domestiqués initialement induits par des réponses plastiques à l'environnement, sont autant de mécanismes qui ont contribué à l’émergence et la diffusion du maïs cultivé. / Species complexes combining wild and cultivated forms provide a unique opportunity to dissect the determinants of adaptation at a short time scale (since domestication) and at a longer time scale (natural selection in wild populations). Here, we studied the complex formed by the cultivated maize, Zea mays ssp. mays, and related wild forms, teosintes subspecies Zea mays ssp. mexicana and ssp. parviglumis. Maize was domesticated from the later in Mexico about 9,000 years ago. We first studied the demographic history of maize using re-sequencing data (24-53x depth) of 31 local maize varieties covering its pre-Colombian distribution. We confirmed a bottleneck during domestication, resulting in a significant reduction in effective population size, as well as bottleneck effects during its post-domestication release. The adverse effects of these demographic events result in an increase in deleterious alleles in maize compared to its wild forms, especially in Andean maize. Interestingly, we detected introgression of mexicana subspecies into corn grown in the highlands of Mexico, Guatemala, and the southwestern United States, which reduced the prevalence of deleterious alleles. We then studied the plastic changes in gene expression by comparing maize and teosinte transcriptomes under current climatic conditions and conditions similar to those found at the time of domestication - low temperature and low CO₂ content. We have identified more than 2000 locus that show a differential expression of conditions in teosintes, but whose expression does not vary in corn. These results suggest a greater plastic response in teosintes, supported by observations of more substantial changes in co-expression networks in teosintes compared to maize. We then searched for genomic signatures of local adaptation in six natural populations of the subspecies parviglumis (20-25x sequencing depth). Genomic scans have identified loci with hard and soft selective sweeps. The low overlap of these loci between populations indicates a strong local adaptation. Thus, genetic adaptation to a small geographical scale, repeated introgression between wild and domestic forms and genetic assimilation that "cements" domesticated phenotypes initially induced by plastic responses to the environment, are all mechanisms that contributed the emergence and spread of cultivated maize.

In the current environment of severe climate change, studying the adaptability of Norway spruce to the environment, that is, local adaptation is of great significance for helping to protect forest tree species and genetic breeding. As a structural variation, copy number variations (CNVs) have been proved to play an important role in shaping population structure and local adaptation in marine species, going beyond traditional studies focusing only on SNPs. Therefore, this experiment was to investigate the association of genotypes, including CNVs and SNPs, with local adaptation in Norway spruce. About 5.631% of CNVs were screened from SNPs, and the population structure of Norway spruce was detected based on the data of SNPs and CNVs. Then, the associations between genotypes (SNPs and CNVs) and the environmental variables are calculated by the model, considering the effects of population structure. Finally, the relationship between CNVs and SNPs and local adaptation of Norway spruce was investigated by redundancy analysis (RDA). The results preliminarily revealed that SNPs and CNVs had certain effects on the local adaptation of Norway spruce and a significant correlation with various environmental factors. However, the results indicated comparing to SNPs, CNVs had no significant effect on the local adaptation of Norway spruce.

Identifying genetically appropriate plant materials for seed based restoration relies on the principle of local adaptation where the objective is to match adaptive genetic characteristics to variation in ecological clines pertinent to plant establishment and persistence. In this study, basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus (Scribn. & Merr.) Á. Löve) sources from 25 wild populations and 4 commercial varieties were planted at 4 test sites. We assessed initial establishment and short term persistance. Plantings failed at 2 sites in both 2013 and 2014, with too few plants to quantify differences. At the remaining 2 sites, local sources had higher initial establishment in just 1 of 10 comparisons. Among commercial sources, the cultivars Magnar and Trailhead initially outperformed local pooled materials at Fountain Green but not at Nephi. Initial establishment under row cover was dramatically better than uncovered controls at both sites, but only persisted for 4 years after planting at the Fountain Green site. The native forb study evaluated the effects of species, sowing depth and row cover on field emergence of 20 forbs. Overall, emergence was very low ranging between 0.2% and 1.0% for 16 of the 20 species. Four species exceeded 1% emergence. Depth effects were species, site and year dependent. The odds of emergence decreased with increasing depth for four species, increased for three species and were mixed between sites and years for the remaining species. The odds of emergence were better under row cover than for uncovered control plots. Depths evaluated were deeper than recommended for most species and likely hindered emergence for some species. Site and year had much more effect on observed emergence than depth or treatment. Developing simple diagnostics to identify subspecies is key in the restoration of sagebrush ecosystems. We evaluated the SoilWeb app as a tool to identify sagebrush in the field. We evaluated the accuracy of the Richardson et.al. (2015) technique to classify sagebrush stands and evaluated data modeling strategies to improve classification accuracy. We found the SoilWeb app to be an accurate and informative tool to identify native-wild sagebrush populations. The Richardson et.al. (2015) seed weight criteria correctly classified just 19% of our sample populations to the correct subspecies. To improve upon this, we evaluated multifactor modeling using recursive partitioning and classification trees. Our most accurate classification tree correctly classified 80% of 2x tridentata sites but just 45% of wyomingensis sites.

Many organisms have geographical distributions extending from the tropics to near polar regions or can experience up to 30°C temperature variation within the lifespan of an individual. Two forms of evolutionary adaptation to such wide ranges in ambient temperatures are frequently discussed: local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity. The freshwater planktonic crustaceanDaphnia magna, whose range extends from South Africa to near arctic sites, shows strong phenotypic and genotypic variation in response to temperature. In this study, we use D. magna clones from 22 populations (one clone per population) ranging from latitude 0° (Kenya) to 66° North (White Sea) to explore the contributions of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation to high temperature tolerance. Temperature tolerance was studied as knockout time (time until immobilization, Timm) at 37°C in clones acclimatized to either 20°C or 28°C. Acclimatization to 28°C strongly increased Timm, testifying to adaptive phenotypic plasticity. At the same time, Timm significantly correlated with average high temperature at the clones' sites of origin, suggesting local adaptation. As earlier studies have found that haemoglobin expression contributes to temperature tolerance, we also quantified haemoglobin concentration in experimental animals and found that both acclimatization temperature (AccT) and temperature at the site of origin are positively correlated with haemoglobin concentration. Furthermore, Daphnia from warmer climates upregulate haemoglobin much more strongly in response to AccT, suggesting local adaptation for plasticity in haemoglobin expression. Our results show that both local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity contribute to temperature tolerance, and elucidate a possible role of haemoglobin in mediating these effects that differs along a cold-warm gradient.

Many organisms have geographical distributions extending from the tropics to near polar regions or can experience up to 30°C temperature variation within the lifespan of an individual. Two forms of evolutionary adaptation to such wide ranges in ambient temperatures are frequently discussed: local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity. The freshwater planktonic crustaceanDaphnia magna, whose range extends from South Africa to near arctic sites, shows strong phenotypic and genotypic variation in response to temperature. In this study, we use D. magna clones from 22 populations (one clone per population) ranging from latitude 0° (Kenya) to 66° North (White Sea) to explore the contributions of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation to high temperature tolerance. Temperature tolerance was studied as knockout time (time until immobilization, Timm) at 37°C in clones acclimatized to either 20°C or 28°C. Acclimatization to 28°C strongly increased Timm, testifying to adaptive phenotypic plasticity. At the same time, Timm significantly correlated with average high temperature at the clones' sites of origin, suggesting local adaptation. As earlier studies have found that haemoglobin expression contributes to temperature tolerance, we also quantified haemoglobin concentration in experimental animals and found that both acclimatization temperature (AccT) and temperature at the site of origin are positively correlated with haemoglobin concentration. Furthermore, Daphnia from warmer climates upregulate haemoglobin much more strongly in response to AccT, suggesting local adaptation for plasticity in haemoglobin expression. Our results show that both local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity contribute to temperature tolerance, and elucidate a possible role of haemoglobin in mediating these effects that differs along a cold-warm gradient.

Geographic variation in thermal tolerance in Daphnia seems to represent genetic load at the loci specifically responsible for heat tolerance resulting from conditional neutrality. We see no evidence of trade-offs between fitness-related traits at 25 °C vs. 10 °C or between two algal diets across Daphnia magna clones from a variety of locations representing the opposite ends of the distribution of long-term heat tolerance. Likewise, we found no evidence of within-environment trade-offs between heat tolerance and fitness-related traits in any of the environments. Neither short-term and long-term heat tolerance shows any consistent relationship with lipid fluorescence polarization and lipid peroxidation across clones or environments. Pervasive positive correlations between fitness-related traits indicate differences in genetic load rather than trade-off based local adaptation or thermal specialization. For heat tolerance such differences may be caused by either relaxation of stabilizing selection due to lower exposure to high temperature extremes, i.e., conditional neutrality, or by small effective population size followed by the recent range expansion.

Terrestrial plants exist in almost every habitat on the earth, ranging from warm and moist tropical rainforests, hot and dry deserts, and to cold and barren tundras. Furthermore, a single species may encounter different climatic conditionshabitats within its range distribution which climatic conditions differs from one to another. In this study, I examine the flowering phenology and fitness of two locally adapted genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana, one from the southern range limit (Italy) and one from the northern range limit (Sweden) in Europe, in an outdoor common-garden experiment in Uppsala. Flowering start was recorded to characterize flowering phenology, whilst survival and fecundity was recorded to characterize fitness. Flowering start differed significantly between the two genotypes as with the Swedish genotype startinged flowering 24 days later than the Italian genotype. The Italian genotype had higher fitness (number of fruits per seedling planted), which was due to a slightly higher survival and fecundity. The relative fitness of the two genotypes was thus intermediate to that observed in reciprocal transplants between the native sites of origin of the two populations.

Arabidopsis arenosa represents a promising model for studying the mechanisms underlying the adaptation to serpentine soil. Genetic basis of serpentine adaptation is still poorly known and A. arenosa possesses many advantages as a tool to complete that knowledge. The first step of this study was to reveal the presence of a local adaptation to serpentine soil in a population of A. arenosa. To do so, I used the data from a reciprocal transplant experiment realized between a Czech pair of serpentine - non-serpentine populations and I explored the phenotypes associated with the adaptation. Subsequently, I produced the F2 hybrids coming from crosses between serpentine - non-serpentine parents and I studied the expression of fitness traits in F2 plants growing in serpentine in order to estimate the number of loci underlying the adaptation which I compared with other studies. I confirmed the presence of a local adaptation, with the population of serpentine origin performing better than the non-serpentine population in the serpentine substrate of origin, associated with accumulation of heavy metals in the leaves. Analyses of the soil composition revealed differences in heavy metals and nutrients contents, Ca/Mg ratio and pH between the two localities. Those results fitted with the function of the candidate...

Phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation via genetic change are two major mechanisms of response to dynamic environmental conditions. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, since genetic change can establish similar phenotypes to plasticity. This connection between both mechanisms raises the question of how much of the variation observed between species or populations is plastic and how much of it is genetic. In this study, we used a structured population of fire salamanders (Salamandra salamandra), in which two subpopulations differ in terms of physiology, genetics, mate-, and habitat preferences. Our goal was to identify candidate genes for differential habitat adaptation in this system, and to explore the degree of plasticity compared to local adaptation. We therefore performed a reciprocal transfer experiment of stream- and pond-originated salamander larvae and analyzed changes in morphology and transcriptomic profile (using species-specific microarrays). We observed that stream- and pond-originated individuals diverge in morphology and gene expression. For instance, pond-originated larvae have larger gills, likely to cope with oxygen-poor ponds. When transferred to streams, pond-originated larvae showed a high degree of plasticity, resembling the morphology and gene expression of stream-originated larvae (reversion); however the same was not found for stream-originated larvae when transferred to ponds, where the expression of genes related to reduction-oxidation processes was increased, possibly to cope with environmental stress. The lack of symmetrical responses between transplanted animals highlights the fact that the adaptations are not fully plastic and that some level of local adaptation has already occurred in this population. This study illuminates the process by which phenotypic plasticity allows local adaptation to new environments and its potential role in the pathway of incipient speciation.

No description available.