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The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation

Serpentine barrens are among the most challenging settings for plant life. Representing a perfect storm of hazards, serpentines consist of broadly skewed elemental profiles, including abundant toxic metals and low nutrient contents on drought-prone, patchily distributed substrates. Accordingly, plan...

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Autores principales: Konečná, Veronika, Yant, Levi, Kolář, Filip
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7772150/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33391295
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.574616
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author Konečná, Veronika
Yant, Levi
Kolář, Filip
author_facet Konečná, Veronika
Yant, Levi
Kolář, Filip
author_sort Konečná, Veronika
collection PubMed
description Serpentine barrens are among the most challenging settings for plant life. Representing a perfect storm of hazards, serpentines consist of broadly skewed elemental profiles, including abundant toxic metals and low nutrient contents on drought-prone, patchily distributed substrates. Accordingly, plants that can tolerate the challenges of serpentine have fascinated biologists for decades, yielding important insights into adaptation to novel ecologies through physiological change. Here we highlight recent progress from studies which demonstrate the power of serpentine as a model for the genomics of adaptation. Given the moderate – but still tractable – complexity presented by the mix of hazards on serpentine, these venues are well-suited for the experimental inquiry of adaptation both in natural and manipulated conditions. Moreover, the island-like distribution of serpentines across landscapes provides abundant natural replicates, offering power to evolutionary genomic inference. Exciting recent insights into the genomic basis of serpentine adaptation point to a partly shared basis that involves sampling from common allele pools available from retained ancestral polymorphism or via gene flow. However, a lack of integrated studies deconstructing complex adaptations and linking candidate alleles with fitness consequences leaves room for much deeper exploration. Thus, we still seek the crucial direct link between the phenotypic effect of candidate alleles and their measured adaptive value – a prize that is exceedingly rare to achieve in any study of adaptation. We expect that closing this gap is not far off using the promising model systems described here.
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spelling pubmed-77721502020-12-31 The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation Konečná, Veronika Yant, Levi Kolář, Filip Front Plant Sci Plant Science Serpentine barrens are among the most challenging settings for plant life. Representing a perfect storm of hazards, serpentines consist of broadly skewed elemental profiles, including abundant toxic metals and low nutrient contents on drought-prone, patchily distributed substrates. Accordingly, plants that can tolerate the challenges of serpentine have fascinated biologists for decades, yielding important insights into adaptation to novel ecologies through physiological change. Here we highlight recent progress from studies which demonstrate the power of serpentine as a model for the genomics of adaptation. Given the moderate – but still tractable – complexity presented by the mix of hazards on serpentine, these venues are well-suited for the experimental inquiry of adaptation both in natural and manipulated conditions. Moreover, the island-like distribution of serpentines across landscapes provides abundant natural replicates, offering power to evolutionary genomic inference. Exciting recent insights into the genomic basis of serpentine adaptation point to a partly shared basis that involves sampling from common allele pools available from retained ancestral polymorphism or via gene flow. However, a lack of integrated studies deconstructing complex adaptations and linking candidate alleles with fitness consequences leaves room for much deeper exploration. Thus, we still seek the crucial direct link between the phenotypic effect of candidate alleles and their measured adaptive value – a prize that is exceedingly rare to achieve in any study of adaptation. We expect that closing this gap is not far off using the promising model systems described here. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-12-16 /pmc/articles/PMC7772150/ /pubmed/33391295 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.574616 Text en Copyright © 2020 Konečná, Yant and Kolář. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Plant Science
Konečná, Veronika
Yant, Levi
Kolář, Filip
The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title_full The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title_fullStr The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title_full_unstemmed The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title_short The Evolutionary Genomics of Serpentine Adaptation
title_sort evolutionary genomics of serpentine adaptation
topic Plant Science
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7772150/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33391295
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.574616
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