Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: There has been much excitement about the possibility that exposure to specific environments can induce an ecological memory in the form of whole-sale, genome-wide epigenetic changes that are maintained over many generations. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, numerous heritable DNA methylation differences have been identified in greenhouse-grown isogenic lines, but it remains unknown how natural, highly variable environments affect the rate and spectrum of such changes. Here we present detailed methylome analyses in a geographically dispersed A. thaliana population that constitutes a collection of near-isogenic lines, diverged for at least a century from a common ancestor. Methylome variation largely reflected genetic distance, and was in many aspects similar to that of lines raised in uniform conditions. Thus, even when plants are grown in varying and diverse natural sites, genome-wide epigenetic variation accumulates mostly in a clock-like manner, and epigenetic divergence thus parallels the pattern of genome-wide DNA sequence divergence.
Source: PLoS Genetics
Institutions: Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, European Bioinformatics Institute, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK), Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, University of Chicago, University of Tübingen
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,295
Funders: European Commission, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, National Institutes of Health, Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, FP7 Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Biotechnology
OpenAlex ID: W1973850324