Costs and benefits of induced resistance in a clonal plant network.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gomez S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2039789 | biostudies-other | 2007 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:Recent evidence suggests that stressed plants employ epigenetic mechanisms to transmit acquired resistance traits to their progeny. However, the evolutionary and ecological significance of transgenerational induced resistance (t-IR) is poorly understood because a clear understanding of how parents interpret environmental cues in relation to the effectiveness, stability, and anticipated ecological costs of t-IR is lacking. Here, we have used a full factorial design to study the specificity, costs, and transgenerational stability of t-IR following exposure of Arabidopsis thaliana to increasing stress intensities by a biotrophic pathogen, a necrotrophic pathogen, and salinity. We show that t-IR in response to infection by biotrophic or necrotrophic pathogens is effective against pathogens of the same lifestyle. This pathogen-mediated t-IR is associated with ecological costs, since progeny from biotroph-infected parents were more susceptible to both necrotrophic pathogens and salt stress, whereas progeny from necrotroph-infected parents were more susceptible to biotrophic pathogens. Hence, pathogen-mediated t-IR provides benefits when parents and progeny are in matched environments but is associated with costs that become apparent in mismatched environments. By contrast, soil salinity failed to mediate t-IR against salt stress in matched environments but caused non-specific t-IR against both biotrophic and necrotrophic pathogens in mismatched environments. However, the ecological relevance of this non-specific t-IR response remains questionable as its induction was offset by major reproductive costs arising from dramatically reduced seed production and viability. Finally, we show that the costs and transgenerational stability of pathogen-mediated t-IR are proportional to disease pressure experienced by the parents, suggesting that plants use disease severity as an environmental proxy to adjust investment in t-IR.
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Project description:Inducible defences in phytoplankton are often assumed to come at a cost to the organism, but trade-offs have proven hard to establish experimentally. A reason for this may be that some trade-off costs only become evident under resource-limiting conditions. To explore the effect of nutrient limitation on trade-offs in toxin-producing dinoflagellates, we induced toxin production in Alexandrium minutum by chemical cues from copepods under different levels of nitrogen limitation. The effects were both nitrogen- and grazer-concentration dependent. Induced cells had higher cellular toxin content and a larger fraction of the cells was rejected by a copepod, demonstrating the clear benefits of toxin production. Induced cells also had a higher carbon and nitrogen content, despite up to 25% reduction in cell size. Unexpectedly, induced cells seemed to grow faster than controls, likely owing to a higher specific nutrient affinity due to reduced size. We thus found no clear trade-offs, rather the opposite. However, indirect ecological costs that do not manifest under laboratory conditions may be important. Inducing appropriate defence traits in response to threat-specific warning signals may also prevent larger cumulative costs from expressing several defensive traits simultaneously.
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Project description:BackgroundIn this paper, we consider analytic methods for the integrated analysis of genomic DNA variation and mRNA expression (also named as eQTL data), to discover genetic networks that are associated with a complex trait of interest. Our focus is the systematic evaluation of the trade-off between network size and network search efficiency in the construction of these networks.ResultsWe developed a modular approach to network construction, building from smaller networks to larger ones, thereby reducing the search space while including more variables in the analysis. The goal is achieving a lower computational cost while maintaining high confidence in the resulting networks. As demonstrated in our simulation results, networks built in this way have low node/edge false discovery rate (FDR) and high edge sensitivity comparing to greedy search. We further demonstrate our method in a data set of cellular responses to two chemotherapeutic agents: docetaxel and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), and identify biologically plausible networks that might describe resistances to these drugs.ConclusionIn this study, we suggest that guided comprehensive searches for parsimonious networks should be considered as an alternative to greedy network searches.
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