Natural variation in life history strategy ofArabidopsis thalianadetermines stress responses to drought and insects of different feeding guilds

Abstract

Plants are sessile organisms and, consequently, are exposed to a plethora of stresses in their local habitat. As a result, different populations of a species are subject to different selection pressures leading to adaptation to local conditions and intraspecific divergence. The annual brassicaceous plant Arabidopsis thaliana is an attractive model for ecologists and evolutionary biologists due to the availability of a large collection of resequenced natural accessions. Accessions of A. thaliana display one of two different life cycle strategies: summer and winter annuals. We exposed a collection of 308 European Arabidopsis accessions, that have been genotyped for 250K SNPs, to a range of stresses: one abiotic stress (drought), four biotic stresses (Pieris rapae caterpillars, Plutella xylostella caterpillars, Frankliniella occidentalis thrips and Myzus persicae aphids) and two combined stresses (drought plus P. rapae and Botrytis cinerea fungus plus P. rapae). We identified heritable genetic variation for responses to the different stresses, estimated by narrow‐sense heritability. We found that accessions displaying different life cycle strategies differ in their response to stresses. Winter annuals are more resistant to drought, aphids and thrips and summer annuals are more resistant to P. rapae and P. xylostella caterpillars. Summer annuals are also more resistant to the combined stresses of drought plus P. rapae and infection by the fungus Botryris cinerea plus herbivory by P. rapae. Adaptation to drought displayed a longitudinal gradient. Finally, trade‐offs were recorded between the response to drought and responses to herbivory by caterpillars of the specialist herbivore P. rapae.

Plant trichomes and a single geneGLABRA1contribute to insect community composition on field-grownArabidopsis thaliana

“…3; Table S1). Plant apparency hypothesis posed the importance of such plant life-history traits in anti-herbivore defense [68], and this hypothesis has been recently supported by a meta-analysis [69], comparative study [70], and genome-wide association mapping [65]. In the context of community genetics, plant life-history traits are a key predictor of insect community composition on perennial herbs [6] and woody plants [2].…”

Genome‐wide association analysis reveals distinct genetic architectures for single and combined stress responses in Arabidopsis thaliana

“…The experimental design and treatments have been described in detail in Davila Olivas et al . (). Briefly, two experiments were conducted.…”

Rhizosphere‐associated Pseudomonas induce systemic resistance to herbivores at the cost of susceptibility to bacterial pathogens

“…These tools make Arabidopsis an ideal model to understand the genetic and hormonal mechanisms by which environmental rhizosphere bacteria modulate inducible defence signalling pathways and above‐ground plantbiotic interactions (Pieterse, Van Der Does, Zamioudis, Leon‐Reyes, & Van Wees, ). The repertoire of available Arabidopsis mutants, with known disruptions in pathways responsible for plant–insect and plant–microbe interactions, has enabled reverse genetics approaches to advance our understanding of systemic, multitrophic and ecologically important plant–microbe and plant–herbivore interactions (Davila Olivas et al., ; Groen et al., ; Whiteman et al., ). Additionally, model pathogens and herbivores that can infect or feed on Arabidopsis and whose ranges overlap with Arabidopsis have facilitated standardization of studies across laboratories and can provide information about relative activity through defined defence pathways (Gloss, Nelson Dittrich, Goldman‐Huertas, & Whiteman, ).…”