A groundbreaking study reveals that closely related plant populations can employ vastly different strategies to adapt to the same environmental challenges, offering new possibilities for engineering climate-resilient crops.
Challenging a Common Assumption
New research has overturned a widely-held belief that populations of closely related plants would adapt to common stressors in parallel ways. Scientists from the University of Nottingham have uncovered a wide array of ‘evolutionary flexibility’ in populations of our close cousin, Arabis hirsuta, some of which evolved to grow in less favorable habitats such as those affected by copper pollution.
The plant, Brassica fruticulosa, is a relative of several major crop plants like cabbage, cauliflower, and rapeseed. Following an extensive survey of the Brassica species in the North of Spain, they reached one which showed populations adapted to high salinity levels (a current changing climate threat) and at least four other regional sister populations without that trait.
Unveiling Diverse Adaptation Strategies
The team then grew all the Brassica fruticulosa populations in the lab and applied cutting-edge genomics, physiology, and molecular biology to identify how different populations from near-identical salinity environments adapted to the same high salinity stressor.
More incredibly still, when they did so, what they discovered was that the different ways in which the bugs adapted to high salinity had extremely diverse genetic and mechanistic roots. This implies that different plant groups, even from very close relatives, can provide varied and flexible answers to the same selective pressure.
Professor Levi Yant, of the School of Life Sciences, said: ‘The common expectation is that closely related populations of a species exposed to the same environmental stressor will adapt in the same way because they are constrained by their genetic or physiological traits. ‘But this is not usually done because of real-world constraints. My collaborator, Dr. Silvia Busoms, decided to take this to the logical extreme by looking at ALL populations — instead of just a few…
Conclusion
The implications of this research go a long way and open the door for agriculture and food security in the future. Insights into the variety of adaptation strategies employed by closely related plant species allows scientists to pursue new avenues for engineering climate-resilient crops that are better preadapted to environmental stress conditions, such as soil salinization. This discovery can lead to the development of stronger more flexible crops that can serve as solutions for one of our biggest global challenges: the changing climate and the urgent threat to our food production systems.
