IRFP: Reconstructing the History of Genetic Adaptations to Climate

Hancock Angela M, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Angela Hancock to work with Dr. Joachim Hermisson and Dr. Magnus Nordborg at the University of Vienna and the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria. A single species can occupy a range that encompasses a striking diversity of climates, with dramatic differences in phenotypes between the climatic extremes. Clarifying how organisms evolve in response to climate will yield insights into the evolution of complex traits and can be used to improve models that predict the effects of global climate change. This research aims to clarify how natural populations adapt across climate gradients by identifying genomic regions and biological pathways that have been perturbed in response to climate in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. This project uses emerging ?next-generation? sequencing data for 1001 natural isolates collected across the native geographic range of A. thaliana to identify adaptive genetic variants. These results are then used as a starting point for modeling past adaptation to climate for putative adaptive loci using an Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) approach. The rich genetic and genomic resources available for A. thaliana, together with its broad geographical distribution, make it ideally suited to these analyses. There are several broader impacts of this research. First, it will provide a basic framework for other researchers interested in detecting evidence for spatially varying selection due to climate variation and in modeling adaptive scenarios. Second, these results will improve models to predict the effects of climate change on species distributions by providing information about typical adaptive scenarios. Third, the results will be useful to clarify the genetic bases of agriculturally important traits related to variation in climate. Finally, tools and data generated for this project will be made publicly available and should be useful for follow-up analyses to further understand the molecular and evolutionary basis of climate adaptation. This project develops international collaborations between the PI and project advisors to integrate theoretical and empirical approaches that aim to clarify the role of adaptation to climate in the model species, A. thaliana.