Seminar"Epigenetic variation and its possible role in adaptation and plant breeding"

Title: "Epigenetic variation and its possible role in adaptation and plant breeding"

Speaker: Prof. Ueli Grossniklaus^1,2,3
1Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
²Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland
³Guest Professor, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Abstract:
Traditionally, epigenetic variation is not thought to play a significant role in ecology and evolution because of its inherent instability. Recently, however, epigenetic variation has raised a lot of interest in this field because the high rates at which it arises might allow for rapid adaptation. However, for naturally occurring or induced epigenetic variation to contribute to the adaptation of natural populations or crop plants to a changing environment, epigenetic variation has to be heritable and sufficiently stable to respond to selection.

We are addressing questions related to the stability, heritability, and selectionability of epigenetic variation in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, where we performed various selection experiments and assessed changes in the epigenome, focusing on DNA-methylation as a proxy for epigenetic variation. Our results suggest that purely epigenetic variation can indeed be selected and give rise to novel phenotypes that can be stable for at least a few generations in the absence of selection. However, a response to selection depends on a sufficient level of standing epigenetic variation in the population, which appears to be rare. I will also report on studies on the stability of epigenetic variation over generations and its occurrence in natural populations to address whether it could indeed play a role in adaptation in nature.