Volume 73, Issue 11
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Adaptive phenotypic divergence in an annual grass differs across biotic contexts*

Anna M. O'Brien

E-mail address: anna.obrien@utoronto.ca

Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3B2 Canada

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Ruairidh J.H. Sawers

Laboratorio Nacional de Genómica para la Biodiversidad (LANGEBIO), Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV‐IPN), Irapuato, 36821 Guanajuato, Mexico

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Sharon Y. Strauss

Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

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Jeffrey Ross‐Ibarra

Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

Genome Center, University of California, Davis, California, 95616

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First published: 07 August 2019
Citations: 1

*This article corresponds to David, P. and Jenn, C. 2019. Digest: Biotic interactions shape local adaptation in teosinte populations. Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13857.

Abstract

Climate is a powerful force shaping adaptation within species, yet adaptation to climate occurs against a biotic background: species interactions can filter fitness consequences of genetic variation by altering phenotypic expression of genotypes. We investigated this process using populations of teosinte, a wild annual grass related to maize (Zea mays ssp. mexicana), sampling plants from 10 sites along an elevational gradient as well as rhizosphere biota from three of those sites. We grew half‐sibling teosinte families in each biota to test whether trait divergence among teosinte populations reflects adaptation or drift, and whether rhizosphere biota affect expression of diverged traits. We further assayed the influence of rhizosphere biota on contemporary additive genetic variation. We found that adaptation across environment shaped divergence of some traits, particularly flowering time and root biomass. We also observed that different rhizosphere biota shifted expressed values of these traits within teosinte populations and families and altered within‐population genetic variance and covariance. In sum, our results imply that changes in trait expression and covariance elicited by rhizosphere communities could have played a historical role in teosinte adaptation to environments and that they are likely to play a role in the response to future selection.

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