Carlos Alonso-Blanco

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Spanish National Center for Biotechnology

Flowering plants (angiosperms) can grow at extreme altitudes, and have been observed growing as high as 6,400 metres above sea level1,2; however, the molecular mechanisms that enable plant adaptation specifically to altitude are unknown. One distinguishing feature of increasing altitude is a reduction in the partial pressure of oxygen (pO2). Here w...

Despite the adaptive and taxonomic relevance of the natural diversity for trichome patterning and morphology, the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms underlying these traits remain mostly unknown, particularly in organs other than leaves. In this study, we address the ecological, genetic and molecular bases of the natural variation for trichome p...

Both inter- and intraspecific diversity has been described for trichome patterning in fruits, which is presumably involved in plant adaptation. However, the mechanisms underlying this developmental trait have been hardly addressed. Here we examined natural populations of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) that develop trichomes in fruits and pedice...

Understanding how plants adapt to ambient temperatures has become a major challenge prompted by global climate change. This has led to the identification of several genes regulating the thermal plasticity of plant growth and flowering time. However, the mechanisms accounting for the natural variation and evolution of such developmental plasticity r...

Current global change is fueling an interest to understand the genetic and molecular mechanisms of plant adaptation to climate. In particular, altered flowering time is a common strategy for escape from unfavorable climate temperature. In order to determine the genomic bases underlying flowering time adaptation to this climatic factor, we have syst...

We study natural DNA polymorphisms and associated phenotypes in the Arabidopsis relative Cardamine hirsuta. We observed strong genetic differentiation among several ancestry groups and broader distribution of Iberian relict strains in European C. hirsuta compared to Arabidopsis. We found synchronization between vegetative and reproductive developme...

Centromeres are critical for cell division, loading CENH3 or CENPA histone variant nucleosomes, directing kinetochore formation and allowing chromosome segregation1,2. Despite their conserved function, centromere size and structure are diverse across species. To understand this centromere paradox3,4, it is necessary to know how centromeric diversit...

The cover image is based on the Research Article Differential environmental and genomic architectures shape the natural diversity for trichome patterning and morphology in different Arabidopsis organs by Noelia Arteaga et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.14308.

Evolutionary change begins at the population scale. Therefore, understanding adaptive variation requires the identification of the factors maintaining and shaping standing genetic variation at the within‐population level. Spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity represent ecological drivers of within‐population genetic variation, determinin...

The genetic basis of plant tolerance to parasites is poorly understood. We have previously shown that tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana to its pathogen cucumber mosaic virus is achieved through changes in host life-history traits on infection that result in delaying flowering and reallocating resources from vegetative growth to reproduction. In thi...

Arabidopsis has become a model plant for ecological and population genomics, owing to the substantial phenotypic and genotypic variation that exists among and within natural populations. Specially, the recent availability of large worldwide collections of accessions, together with their full genome sequences, has triggered the study of Arabidopsis...

Background: Disentangling the drivers of genetic differentiation is one of the cornerstones in evolution. This is because genetic diversity, and the way in which it is partitioned within and among populations across space, is an important asset for the ability of populations to adapt and persist in changing environments. We tested three major hypot...

The combination of extensive population sampling with whole-genome sequencing in the annual plant Arabidopsis thaliana has recently allowed the identification of a genetically differentiated relict lineage. The most important nuclei of relict A. thaliana is found in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, although relict accessions have also been f...

Factors that drive continental-scale variation in root microbiota and plant adaptation are poorly understood. We monitored root-associated microbial communities in Arabidopsis thaliana and co-occurring grasses at 17 European sites across 3 years. We observed strong geographic structuring of the soil biome, but not of the root microbiota. A few phyl...

Stomatal abundance varies widely across natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana, and presumably affects plant performance because it influences water and CO2 exchange with the atmosphere and thence photosynthesis and transpiration. In order to determine the genetic basis of this natural variation, we have analyzed a recombinant inbred line (RIL...

Adaptive variation in phenotypic traits enhances the viability of populations in changing environments and accounts for the establishment of new populations in novel environments. In the long run, natural selection determines the distribution range of any organism whose populations may eventually occur in contrasting environments and displaying bro...

Global climate change (GCC) may be imposing distribution range shifts in many organisms worldwide. Multiple efforts are currently focused on the development of models to better predict distribution range shifts due to GCC. We addressed this issue by including intra‐specific genetic structure and spatial autocorrelation (SAC) of data in distribution...

It has been proposed that in wild ecosystems viruses are often plant mutualists, whereas agroecosystems favour pathogenicity. We seek evidence for virus pathogenicity in wild ecosystems through the analysis of plant-virus coevolution, which requires a negative effect of infection on the host fitness. We focus on the interaction between Arabidopsis...

Factors that drive continental-scale variation in root microbiota and plant adaptation are poorly understood. We monitored root-associated microbial communities in Arabidopsis thaliana and co-occurring grasses at 17 European sites across three years. Analysis of 5,625 microbial community profiles demonstrated strong geographic structuring of the so...

Rapid evolution in annual plants can be quantified by comparing phenotypic and genetic changes between past and contemporary individuals from the same populations over several generations. Such knowledge will help understand the response of plants to rapid environmental shifts, such as the ones imposed by global climate change. To that end, we unde...

The evolutionary response of organisms to global climate change is expected to be strongly conditioned by preexisting standing genetic variation. In addition, natural selection imposed by global climate change on fitness‐related traits can be heterogeneous over time. We estimated selection of life‐history traits of an entire genetic lineage of the...

To understand how adaptive evolution in life‐cycle phenology operates in plants, we need to unravel the effects of geographic variation in putative agents of natural selection on life‐cycle phenology by considering all key developmental transitions and their co‐variation patterns. We address this goal by quantifying the temperature‐driven and geogr...

Significance The principal plant model species, Arabidopsis thaliana , is central to our understanding of how molecular variants lead to phenotypic change. In this genome-sequencing effort focused on accessions from Africa, we show that African populations represent the most ancient lineages and provide new clues about the origin of selfing and the...

Recent work has shown that Arabidopsis thaliana contains genetic groups originating from different ice age refugia, with one particular group comprising over 95% of the current worldwide population. In Europe, relicts of other groups can be found in local populations along the Mediterranean Sea. Here we provide evidence that these ‘relicts’ occupie...

Supplementary Figures

Arabidopsis thaliana serves as a model organism for the study of fundamental physiological, cellular, and molecular processes. It has also greatly advanced our understanding of intraspecific genome variation. We present a detailed map of variation in 1,135 high-quality re-sequenced natural inbred lines representing the native Eurasian and North Afr...

The temporal control or timing of the life cycle of annual plants is presumed to provide adaptive strategies to escape harsh environments for survival and reproduction. This is mainly determined by the timing of germination, which is controlled by the level of seed dormancy, and of flowering initiation. However, the environmental factors driving th...

Genetic diversity provides insight into heterogeneous demographic and adaptive history across organisms’ distribution ranges. For this reason, decomposing single species into genetic units may represent a powerful tool to better understand biogeographical patterns as well as improve predictions of the effects of GCC (global climate change) on biodi...

Figure S1. Spatial distribution of Iberian Arabidopsis thaliana accessions based on genetic units: OVR categories (N = 279), genetic clusters (N = 212) and chlorotype groups (N = 181). Figure S2. Genetic structure of Iberian Arabidopsis thaliana accessions estimated with STRUCTURE and nuclear SNPs. Accessions are depicted as horizontal bars divide...

In many flowering plants, the transition to flowering is primarily affected by seasonal changes in day length (photoperiod). An inductive photoperiod promotes flowering via synthesis of a floral stimulus, termed florigen. In Arabidopsis thaliana, the FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) protein is an essential component of florigen, which is synthesized in leaf...

The timing of flowering initiation depends strongly on the environment, a property termed as the plasticity of flowering. Such plasticity determines the adaptive potential of plants since it provides phenotypic buffer against environmental changes, and its natural variation contributes to evolutionary adaptation. We addressed the genetic mechanisms...

Plants are highly sensitive to environmental changes and even small variations in ambient temperature have severe consequences on their growth and development. Temperature affects multiple aspects of plant development, but the processes and mechanisms underlying thermo-sensitive growth responses are mostly unknown. Here we exploit natural variation...

Despite evolutionary conserved mechanisms to silence transposable element activity, there are drastic differences in the abundance of transposable elements even among closely related plant species. We conducted a de novo assembly for the 375 Mb genome of the perennial model plant, Arabis alpina. Analysing this genome revealed long-lasting and recen...

The enormous amount of environmental arsenic was a major factor in determining the biochemistry of incipient life forms early in the Earth's history. The most abundant chemical form in the reducing atmosphere was arsenite, which forced organisms to evolve strategies to manage this chemical species. Following the great oxygenation event, arsenite ox...

Deciphering the genetic and molecular bases of quantitative variation is a long-standing challenge in plant biology because it is essential for understanding evolution and for accelerating plant breeding. Recent multi-trait analyses at different phenotypic levels are uncovering the pleiotropy and the genetic regulation underlying high-level complex...

The role that different life-history traits may have in the process of adaptation caused by divergent selection can be assessed by using extensive collections of geographically-explicit populations. This is because adaptive phenotypic variation shifts gradually across space as a result of the geographic patterns of variation in environmental select...

Deciphering the genetic structure of Arabidopsis thaliana diversity across its geographic range provides the bases for elucidating the demographic history of this model plant. Despite the unique A. thaliana genomic resources currently available, its history in North Africa, the extreme southern limit in the biodiversity hotspot of the Mediterranean...

The name, e-mail address and affiliation of members of the TRANSPLANTA Consortium participating in this work are listed in Table S1. SUMMARY Transcription factors (TFs) are key regulators of gene expression in all organisms. In eukaryotes, TFs are often represented by functionally redundant members of large gene families. Overexpression might prove...

Significance Semidwarf accessions occur at low frequency across the distribution range of Arabidopsis thaliana and are mainly mutants of the GA5 ( GA20ox1 ) gene, mutations of which originate from wild-type alleles still present in the regions where the mutants were found. We identified the causal mutations by allelism tests and sequencing and perf...

The timing of flowering initiation is a fundamental trait for the adaptation of annual plants to different environments. Large amounts of intraspecific quantitative variation have been described for it among natural accessions of many species, but the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms underlying this genetic variation are mainly being determine...

A. thaliana natural accessions analyzed for SVP sequence and causal polymorphism. (XLS)

Oligonucleotides used for SVP sequencing, accession genotyping, cloning and verification of transgenic lines. (XLS)

Sequence comparison of MADS domains of SVP and MADS proteins from different species. The alignment includes 30 SVP proteins from 22 plant species and 10 MADS related proteins from six species. FAQ1 causal polymorphism between Ler and Fuk accessions (Ala32 to Val32) is indicated, and the conserved Ler-Ala32 is highlighted. Genbank accession numbers...

SVP nucleotide diversity. (XLS)

Flowering behaviour of genotypes with different natural SVP alleles. (XLS)

General linear model testing the effects of SVP transgenes, the genetic background and the photoperiod in transgenic lines. (XLS)

The study of the evolutionary and population genetics of quantitative traits requires the assessment of within‐ and among‐population patterns of variation. We carried out experiments including eight Iberian Arabidopsis thaliana populations (10 individuals per population) in glasshouse and field conditions. We quantified among‐ and within‐population...

Soil acidification is a major agricultural problem that negatively affects crop yield [1, 2]. Root systems counteract detrimental passive proton influx from acidic soil through increased proton pumping into the apoplast [3], which is presumably also required for cell elongation and stimulated by auxin [4, 5]. Here, we found an unexpected impact of...

Local adaptation provides an opportunity to study the genetic basis of adaptation and investigate the allelic architecture of adaptive genes. We study delay of germination 1 (DOG1), a gene controlling natural variation in seed dormancy in Arabidopsis thaliana and investigate evolution of dormancy in 41 populations distributed in four regions separa...

Vernalization, the induction of flowering by low winter temperatures, is likely to be involved in plant climatic adaptation. However, the genetic, molecular and ecological bases underlying the quantitative variation that tunes vernalization sensitivity to natural environments are largely unknown. To address these questions, we have studied the enha...

Extensive natural variation has been described for the timing of flowering initiation in many annual plants, including the model wild species Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), which is presumed to be involved in adaptation to different climates. However, the environmental factors that might shape this genetic variation, as well as the molecular b...

The plant Arabidopsis thaliana occurs naturally in many different habitats throughout Eurasia. As a foundation for identifying genetic variation contributing to adaptation to diverse environments, a 1001 Genomes Project to sequence geographically diverse A. thaliana strains has been initiated. Here we present the first phase of this project, based...

Currently, there exists a limited knowledge on the extent of temporal variation in population genetic parameters of natural populations. Here, we study the extent of temporal variation in population genetics by genotyping 151 genome-wide SNP markers polymorphic in 466 individuals collected from nine populations of the annual plant Arabidopsis thali...

Current understanding of stomatal development in Arabidopsis thaliana is based on mutations producing aberrant, often lethal phenotypes. The aim was to discover if naturally occurring viable phenotypes would be useful for studying stomatal development in a species that enables further molecular analysis. Natural variation in stomatal abundance of A...

Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Biología. Fecha de lectura: 03-12-2008 Bibliogr.: p.107-123 p.

Arabidopsis thaliana is a wild species widely distributed in diverse environments and current resources allow efficient quantitative analyses aimed to identify the genetic and molecular bases of adaptation. The study of natural genetic variation in this model plant has rapidly developed in the past 10 years, leading to the identification of hundred...

Understanding plant-virus coevolution requires wild systems in which there is no human manipulation of either host or virus. To develop such a system, we analysed virus infection in six wild populations of Arabidopsis thaliana in Central Spain. The incidence of five virus species with different life-styles was monitored during four years, and this...