ABSTRACT
Abstract The naturally occurring wild barley mutant eibi1/hvabcg31 suffers from severe water loss due to the permeable leaf cuticle. Eibi1/HvABCG31 encodes a full ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter, HvABCG31, playing a role in cutin deposition in the elongation zone of growing barley leaves. The eibi1 allele has pleiotropic effects on the appearance of leaves, plant stature, fertility, spike and grain size, and rate of germination. Comparative transcriptome profile of the leaf elongation zone of the eibi1 mutant as well as its isogenic wild type showed that various pathogenesis-related genes were up-regulated in the eibi1 mutant. The known cuticle-related genes that we analyzed did not show significant expression difference between the mutant and wild type. These results suggest that the pleiotropic effects may be a compensatory consequence of the activation of defense genes in the eibi1 mutation. Furthermore, we were able to find the mutation of the eibi1/hvabcg31 allele by comparing transcript sequences, which indicated that the RNA-Seq is useful not only for researches on general molecular mechanism but also for the identification of possible mutant genes.
ABSTRACT
Environmental stress has been suggested to be a major evolutionary force, both through inducing strong selection and because of its direct impact on developmental buffering processes that alter the evolvability of organisms. In particular, temperature has attracted much attention because of its importance as an ecological feature and the relative ease with which it can be experimentally manipulated in the lab. Evolution Canyon, Lower Nahal Oren, Israel, is a well studied natural site where ecological parameters are suspected to drive evolutionary differentiation. In this study, using Drosophila melanogaster isofemale lines derived from wild flies collected on both slopes of the canyon, we investigated the effect of developmental temperature upon the different components of phenotypic variation of a complex trait: the wing. Combining geometric and traditional morphometrics, we find only limited evidence for a differentiation among slopes. Investigating simultaneously phenotypic plasticity, genetic variation among isofemale lines, variation among individuals and fluctuating asymmetry, we could not identify a consistent effect of the stressful conditions encountered on the south facing slope. The prevailing structuring effect is that of the experimentally manipulated temperature which clearly influences wing mean size and shape. Variability, in contrast, is not consistently affected by temperature. Finally, we investigated the specific relationship between individual variation and fluctuating asymmetry. Using metric multi-dimensional scaling we show that the related patterns of wing shape variation are not identical, supporting the view that the underlying developmental processes are to a certain extent different.