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Parental environmental effects on life history traits in Arabidopsis thaliana (Brassicaceae)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 1999

C. ANDALO
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d'Ecologie, Systématique et Evolution, URA 2154, Université Paris-Sud, Bât 362, F-91 405 Orsay cedex, France
S. J. MAZER
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
B. GODELLE
Affiliation:
Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon, 16 rue Claude Bernard, F-75231 Paris cedex 05, France
N. MACHON
Affiliation:
Conservatoire Botanique du Bassin Parisien, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 61 rue Buffon, F-75005 Paris, France
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Abstract

Environmentally induced maternal effects on offspring phenotype are well known in plants. When genotypes or maternal lineages are replicated and raised in different environmental conditions, the phenotype of their offspring often depends on the environment in which the parents developed. However, the degree to which such maternal effects are maintained over subsequent generations has not been documented in many taxa. Here we report the results of a study designed to assess the effects of parental environment on vegetative and reproductive traits, using glasshouse-raised maternal lines sampled from natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana. Replicates of five highly selfed lines from each of four wild populations were cultivated in two abiotic environments in the glasshouse, and the quality and performance of seeds derived from these two environments were examined over two generations. We found that offspring phenotype was strongly influenced by parental environment, but because the parental environments differed with respect to the time of seed harvest, it was not possible to distinguish clearly between parental environmental effects and the possible (but unlikely) effects of seed age on offspring phenotype. We observed a rapid decline in the expression of ancestral environmental effects, and no main environmental effects on progeny phenotype persisted in the second generation. The mechanism of transmission of environmental effects did not appear to be associated with the quantity or quality of reserves in the seeds, suggesting that environmental effects may be transmitted across subsequent generations via some mechanism that generates environment-specific gene expression.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Trustees of the New Phytologist 1999

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