Domestication is a tractable system for following evolutionary change. Under domestication, wild populations respond to shifting selective pressures, resulting in adaptation to the new ecological ...niche of cultivation. Owing to the important role of domesticated crops in human nutrition and agriculture, the ancestry and selection pressures transforming a wild plant into a domesticate have been extensively studied. In Zea mays, morphological, genetic and genomic studies have elucidated how a wild plant, the teosinte Z. mays subsp. parviglumis, was transformed into the domesticate Z. mays subsp. mays. Five major morphological differences distinguish these two subspecies, and careful genetic dissection has pinpointed the molecular changes responsible for several of these traits. But maize domestication was a consequence of more than just five genes, and regions throughout the genome contribute. The impacts of these additional regions are contingent on genetic background, both the interactions between alleles of a single gene and among alleles of the multiple genes that modulate phenotypes. Key genetic interactions include dominance relationships, epistatic interactions and pleiotropic constraint, including how these variants are connected in gene networks. Here, we review the role of gene interactions in generating the dramatic phenotypic evolution seen in the transition from teosinte to maize.
•Population genetics holds promise to identify traits and ecological variables driving local adaptation.•These approaches can also be used to uncover the genetic architecture of local ...adaptation.•Challenges and limitations related to data quality and statistical analyses should not be overlooked and impose limits on the power of population genetic approaches.
Local adaptation shapes species diversity, can be a stepping stone to ecological speciation, and can facilitate species range expansion. Population genetic analyses, which complement organismal approaches in advancing our understanding of local adaptation, have become widespread in recent years. We focus here on using population genetics to address some key questions in local adaptation: what traits are involved? What environmental variables are the most important? Does local adaptation target the same genes in related species? Do loci responsible for local adaptation exhibit trade-offs across environments? After discussing these questions we highlight important limitations to population genetic analyses including challenges with obtaining high-quality data, deciding which loci are targets of selection, and limits to identifying the genetic basis of local adaptation.
Summary
Transposable elements (TEs) are ubiquitous components of eukaryotic genomes and can create variation in genome organization and content. Most maize genomes are composed of TEs. We developed ...an approach to define shared and variable TE insertions across genome assemblies and applied this method to four maize genomes (B73, W22, Mo17 and PH207) with uniform structural annotations of TEs. Among these genomes we identified approximately 400 000 TEs that are polymorphic, encompassing 1.6 Gb of variable TE sequence. These polymorphic TEs include a combination of recent transposition events as well as deletions of older TEs. There are examples of polymorphic TEs within each of the superfamilies of TEs and they are found distributed across the genome, including in regions of recent shared ancestry among individuals. There are many examples of polymorphic TEs within or near maize genes. In addition, there are 2380 gene annotations in the B73 genome that are located within variable TEs, providing evidence for the role of TEs in contributing to the substantial differences in annotated gene content among these genotypes. TEs are highly variable in our survey of four temperate maize genomes, highlighting the major contribution of TEs in driving variation in genome organization and gene content.
Open Research Badges
This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://github.com/SNAnderson/maizeTE_variation; https://mcstitzer.github.io/maize_TEs.
Significance Statement
Transposable elements (TEs) comprise the majority of the maize genome and are known to be variable across lines; however identifying shared and variable insertions on a genomic scale has been difficult. This study surveys presence/absence variation for TEs in four maize genomes, identifying approximately 400 000 elements that are polymorphic, encompassing 1.6 Gb of variable sequence. This provides a comprehensive resource to study the role of transposons in shaping plant genomes and transcriptomes.
Transposable elements (TEs) constitute the majority of flowering plant DNA, reflecting their tremendous success in subverting, avoiding, and surviving the defenses of their host genomes to ensure ...their selfish replication. More than 85% of the sequence of the maize genome can be ascribed to past transposition, providing a major contribution to the structure of the genome. Evidence from individual loci has informed our understanding of how transposition has shaped the genome, and a number of individual TE insertions have been causally linked to dramatic phenotypic changes. Genome-wide analyses in maize and other taxa have frequently represented TEs as a relatively homogeneous class of fragmentary relics of past transposition, obscuring their evolutionary history and interaction with their host genome. Using an updated annotation of structurally intact TEs in the maize reference genome, we investigate the family-level dynamics of TEs in maize. Integrating a variety of data, from descriptors of individual TEs like coding capacity, expression, and methylation, as well as similar features of the sequence they inserted into, we model the relationship between attributes of the genomic environment and the survival of TE copies and families. In contrast to the wholesale relegation of all TEs to a single category of junk DNA, these differences reveal a diversity of survival strategies of TE families. Together these generate a rich ecology of the genome, with each TE family representing the evolution of a distinct ecological niche. We conclude that while the impact of transposition is highly family- and context-dependent, a family-level understanding of the ecology of TEs in the genome can refine our ability to predict the role of TEs in generating genetic and phenotypic diversity.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The history of maize has been characterized by major demographic events, including population size changes associated with domestication and range expansion, and gene flow with wild relatives. The ...interplay between demographic history and selection has shaped diversity across maize populations and genomes.
We investigate these processes using high-depth resequencing data from 31 maize landraces spanning the pre-Columbian distribution of maize, and four wild teosinte individuals (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis). Genome-wide demographic analyses reveal that maize experienced pronounced declines in effective population size due to both a protracted domestication bottleneck and serial founder effects during post-domestication spread, while parviglumis in the Balsas River Valley experienced population growth. The domestication bottleneck and subsequent spread led to an increase in deleterious alleles in the domesticate compared to the wild progenitor. This cost is particularly pronounced in Andean maize, which has experienced a more dramatic founder event compared to other maize populations. Additionally, we detect introgression from the wild teosinte Zea mays ssp. mexicana into maize in the highlands of Mexico, Guatemala, and the southwestern USA, which reduces the prevalence of deleterious alleles likely due to the higher long-term effective population size of teosinte.
These findings underscore the strong interaction between historical demography and the efficiency of selection and illustrate how domesticated species are particularly useful for understanding these processes. The landscape of deleterious alleles and therefore evolutionary potential is clearly influenced by recent demography, a factor that could bear importantly on many species that have experienced recent demographic shifts.
Genetic diversity created by transposable elements is an important source of functional variation upon which selection acts during evolution. Transposable elements are associated with adaptation to ...temperate climates in Drosophila, a SINE element is associated with the domestication of small dog breeds from the gray wolf and there is evidence that transposable elements were targets of selection during human evolution. Although the list of examples of transposable elements associated with host gene function continues to grow, proof that transposable elements are causative and not just correlated with functional variation is limited. Here we show that a transposable element (Hopscotch) inserted in a regulatory region of the maize domestication gene, teosinte branched1 (tb1), acts as an enhancer of gene expression and partially explains the increased apical dominance in maize compared to its progenitor, teosinte. Molecular dating indicates that the Hopscotch insertion predates maize domestication by at least 10,000 years, indicating that selection acted on standing variation rather than new mutation.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Adaptation in plant genomes Mei, Wenbin; Stetter, Markus G.; Gates, Daniel J. ...
American journal of botany,
01/2018, Letnik:
105, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Since their origin 160 million years ago, flowering plants have rapidly diversified into more than 300,000 species, adapting to a striking array of habitats and conditions. Given their diversity and ...importance, a considerable body of research has been devoted to understanding plant adaptation (Tiffin and Ross-Ibarra, 2014), but the relative importance of the various factors that may impact the process of adaptation are still not well understood. Here Mel et al propose that genome size may play a previously under-appreciated role in determining how plants adapt. Rather than focus on the mechanisms of genome size variation or the adaptive significance of genome size itself, our functional space hypothesis predicts that interspecific differences in genome size may affect the process of adaptation by changing the number and location of potentially functional mutations.
Climate is a powerful force shaping adaptation within species, yet adaptation to climate occurs against a biotic background: species interactions can filter fitness consequences of genetic variation ...by altering phenotypic expression of genotypes. We investigated this process using populations of teosinte, a wild annual grass related to maize (Zea mays ssp. mexicana), sampling plants from 10 sites along an elevational gradient as well as rhizosphere biota from three of those sites. We grew half-sibling teosinte families in each biota to test whether trait divergence among teosinte populations reflects adaptation or drift, and whether rhizosphere biota affect expression of diverged traits. We further assayed the influence of rhizosphere biota on contemporary additive genetic variation. We found that adaptation across environment shaped divergence of some traits, particularly flowering time and root biomass. We also observed that different rhizosphere biota shifted expressed values of these traits within teosinte populations and families and altered within-population genetic variance and covariance. In sum, our results imply that changes in trait expression and covariance elicited by rhizosphere communities could have played a historical role in teosinte adaptation to environments and that they are likely to play a role in the response to future selection.
Crop production is becoming an increasing challenge as the global population grows and the climate changes. Modern cultivated crop species are selected for productivity under optimal growth ...environments and have often lost genetic variants that could allow them to adapt to diverse, and now rapidly changing, environments. These genetic variants are often present in their closest wild relatives, but so are less desirable traits. How to preserve and effectively utilize the rich genetic resources that crop wild relatives offer while avoiding detrimental variants and maladaptive genetic contributions is a central challenge for ongoing crop improvement. This Essay explores this challenge and potential paths that could lead to a solution.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The natural history of maize began nine thousand years ago when Mexican farmers started to collect the seeds of the wild grass, teosinte. Invaluable as a food source, maize permeated Mexican culture ...and religion. Its domestication eventually led to its adoption as a model organism, aided in large part by its large chromosomes, ease of pollination and growing agricultural importance. Genome comparisons between varieties of maize, teosinte and other grasses are beginning to identify the genes responsible for the domestication of modern maize and are also providing ideas for the breeding of more hardy varieties.
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