Thursday, April 19th, 2012
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In a paper published in and April 2012 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics, a CGSB research group led by Michael Purugganan explores how plant genes are turned on and off out in nature. The study helps in understanding how plant genomes can respond to natural environmental signals, and how they adapt to different habitats, agricultural fields and even to climate change. The CGSB team, including postdoctoral scientists Christina Richards, Ulises Rosas and Josh Banta, grew two natural accessions of the model plant |
Arabidopsis thaliana in an open field in Long Island in the spring of 2008, and examined genome-wide gene expression patterns in the wild. They found nearly 200 gene expression clusters in field-grown plants, and many of these clusters were enriched in genes that had previously been shown to be associated with expression under various environmental stress conditions.Major gene expression changes were found to be associated with environmental fluctuations in temperature and rainfall. By exploring genome-wide gene expression in plants in the wild, we were able to connect aspects of plant molecular biology with ecological responses in nature, and begin to understand how organisms behave and adapt in their natural environments
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program and the Division of Environmental Biology, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Human Frontiers Science Program.