Abstract
Invasive species provide an opportune system to investigate how populations respond to new environments. Baby's breath (Gypsophila paniculata) was introduced to North America in the 1800s and has since spread throughout the United States and western Canada. We used an RNA‐seq approach to explore how molecular processes contribute to the success of invasive populations with similar genetic backgrounds across distinct habitats. Transcription profiles were constructed from seedlings collected from a sand dune ecosystem in Petoskey, MI (PSMI), and a sagebrush ecosystem in Chelan, WA (CHWA). We assessed differential gene expression and identified SNPs within differentially expressed genes. We identified 1,146 differentially expressed transcripts across all sampled tissues between the two populations. GO processes enriched in PSMI were associated with nutrient starvation, while enriched processes in CHWA were associated with abiotic stress. Only 7.4% of the differentially expressed transcripts contained SNPs differing in allele frequencies of at least 0.5 between populations. Common garden studies found the two populations differed in germination rate and seedling emergence success. Our results suggest the success of G. paniculata in these two environments is likely due to plasticity in specific molecular processes responding to different environmental conditions, although some genetic divergence may be contributing to these differences.
Highlights
The ability of invasive species to invade, adapt, and thrive in novel ecosystems has long been a focus of ecological research
Climate data collected from NOAA monitoring stations revealed differences in mean temperature, precipitation, and growing degree day (GDD) between our two sampling locations
The primary drivers that allow invasive species to adapt to novel environments over relatively short periods of evolutionary time is a process not yet fully understood
Summary
The ability of invasive species to invade, adapt, and thrive in novel ecosystems has long been a focus of ecological research. Coined the “paradox of invasions”, examining how invasive populations respond to novel environmental stressors after an assumed reduction in population size during introduction has become an entire field of scientific inquiry [1,2,3]. This paradox has been called into question as research shows that while many invasive populations may undergo a reduction in demographic and/or effective population size after an invasion event, this is not always linked with a subsequent reduction in genetic diversity [1,4]. A better approach may be to examine how invasive species functionally respond to novel environments and assess how specific molecular processes may be contributing to invasive success [3,7,8]
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