Environmental response in gene expression and DNA methylation reveals factors influencing the adaptive potential of Arabidopsis lyrata.

ABSTRACT: Understanding what factors influence plastic and genetic variation is valuable for predicting how organisms respond to changes in the selective environment. Here, using gene expression and DNA methylation as molecular phenotypes, we study environmentally induced variation among Arabidopsis lyrata plants grown at lowland and alpine field sites. Our results show that gene expression is highly plastic, as many more genes are differentially expressed between the field sites than between populations. These environmentally responsive genes evolve under strong selective constraint - the strength of purifying selection on the coding sequence is high, while the rate of adaptive evolution is low. We find, however, that positive selection on cis-regulatory variants has likely contributed to th

SUBMITTER: Hamala T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9616567 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature