Abstract
Flowering time is one of the most critical traits for plants’ life cycles, which is influenced by various environment changes, such as global warming. Previous studies have suggested that to guarantee reproductive success, plants have shifted flowering times to adapt to global warming. Although many studies focused on the molecular mechanisms of early flowering, little was supported by the repeated sampling at different time points through the changing climate. To fully dissect the temporal and spatial evolutionary genetics of flowering time, we investigated nucleotide variation in ten flowering time candidate genes and nine reference genes for the same ten wild-barley populations sampled 28 years apart (1980–2008). The overall genetic differentiation was significantly greater in the descendant populations (2008) compared with the ancestral populations (1980); however, local adaptation tests failed to detect any single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)/indel under spatial-diversifying selection at either time point. By contrast, the WFABC (Wright–Fisher ABC-based approach) that detected 54 SNPs/indels was under strong selection during the past 28 generations. Moreover, all these 54 alleles were segregated in the ancestral populations, but fixed in the descendent populations. Among the top ten SNPs/indels, seven were located in genes of FT1 (FLOWERING TIME LOCUS T 1), CO1 (CONSTANS-LIKE PROTEIN 1), and VRN-H2 (VERNALIZATION-H2), which have been documented to be associated with flowering time regulation in barley cultivars. This study might suggest that all ten populations have undergone parallel evolution over the past few decades in response to global warming, and even an overwhelming local adaptation and ecological differentiation.
Highlights
Supplementary information The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis that the climate has been changing rapidly since the early twentieth century (IPCC 2001; Jones and Osborn et al 2001)
In this study, based on the same ten populations sampled at two time points, we investigated the evolutionary fates of the candidate and reference single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)/indels in samples from the same wild-barley populations sampled in 1980 and 2008 (Nevo et al 2012), and attempted to determine how local adaptation and parallel evolution have influenced the fates of allelic variations in response to global climate change
Based on temporal analysis of allele frequency shifts by WFABC, we found that five out of the top ten SNPs/indels under strong selection were located in the FT1 gene, and they were all fixed in the descendant populations
Summary
Under different scenarios of greenhouse gas emission, the mean global temperature is predicted to increase by 1.8–4.0 °C by Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650201, Yunnan, China 4 State Key Laboratory of Plateau Ecology and Agriculture, Qinghai University, Xining 810016, Qinghai, China 5 Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shenzhen 450002, China 6 College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China 7 Department of Plant Biology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala BioCenter, SE-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden 8 Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel the end of this century (IPCC 2007a; IPCC 2007b) Such rapid global climate change has become one of the major environmental stressors threatening biodiversity and crop production (Lobell and Schlenker et al 2011; Osborne and Rose et al 2013; Thomas and Cameron et al 2004; Thuiller and Lavorel et al 2005). A growing body of data has documented a warming spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and many spring events including flowering time in many wild plants occur earlier than before (Bonsal and Zhang et al 2001; Robeson 2004; Schwartz and Ahas et al 2006)
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