Abstract
The resistance to abiotic stress is increasingly recognised as being impacted by maternal effects, given that environmental conditions experienced by parent (mother) trees affect stress tolerance in offspring. We hypothesised that abiotic environmental maternal effects may also mediate the resistance of trees to biotic stress. The influence of maternal environment and maternal genotype and the interaction of these two factors on early resistance of Pinus pinaster half-sibs to the Fusarium circinatum pathogen was studied using 10 mother genotypes clonally replicated in two contrasting environments. Necrosis length of infected seedlings was 16% shorter in seedlings grown from favourable maternal environment seeds than in seedlings grown from unfavourable maternal environment seeds. Damage caused by F. circinatum was mediated by maternal environment and maternal genotype, but not by seed mass. Mechanisms unrelated to seed provisioning, perhaps of epigenetic nature, were probably involved in the transgenerational plasticity of P. pinaster, mediating its resistance to biotic stress. Our findings suggest that the transgenerational resistance of pines due to an abiotic stress may interact with the defensive response of pines to a biotic stress.
Highlights
A plant’s phenotype may depend on its genotype and the environmental conditions where it grows, as conventionally thought, but can be determined by the environment experienced by the parents [1]
Environmental Maternal Effects on Seedling Performance Seed weight was strongly influenced by the contrasting site qualities of the maternal environments and the maternal genotypes (Table S2)
The effect of the maternal environment (Figure 1A) and the maternal genotype on seedling height was significant throughout the study period, the magnitude of the effects diminished with seedling age, as seen in the decreasing F ratios (Table S3)
Summary
A plant’s phenotype may depend on its genotype and the environmental conditions where it grows, as conventionally thought, but can be determined by the environment experienced by the parents (mainly the mother) [1]. Transgenerational plastic responses to the maternal environment are transmitted to the offspring phenotype without any change in the DNA sequence [2]. As an important source of phenotypic variation, maternal environmental effects can influence the evolutionary process and population dynamics of many plant species [3,4]. The maternal environment is known to influence many traits, e.g. seed traits [8], germination [2], and seedling performance [9] in many different plant species, including long-lived plants such as conifers [7,10,11,12,13]. One of the better known examples of transgenerational plasticity in conifers is the epigenetic memory reported for Norway spruce, in which the temperature and photoperiod experienced by the mother tree during embryo development modulated offspring tolerance to frost through growth phenology adjustments (reviewed in [7]). Similar transgenerational responses to climate cues have been reported in several other conifer species (see references in [7])
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