セミナー情報

Plants are clustered as a population in natural environments. Field studies have shown that herbivory risk to an individual plant depends not only on their own traits but also on those of neighboring plants. Such neighbor effects in anti-herbivore defense may occur through herbivore foraging behaviors or volatile communication between plants; however, genome-wide analyses of the neighbor effects are still lacking. To reveal genomic bases of neighbor effects in anti-herbivore defense, I considered neighbor genotypic identity into genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of field-grown Arabidopsis thaliana. My collaborators and I surveyed insect abundance and leaf damage on 200 accessions at two field sites between two years, and observed beetles and caterpillars colonizing the plants. Our newly proposed method, neighbor GWAS, found that the neighbor effects accounted for 10-30% variation in the leaf damage and insect diversity. We are also conducting RNA-Seq of 2400 plants growing in the field. In this seminar, I will talk about the results of neighbor GWAS and ongoing RNA-Seq for the insect herbivory on field-grown A. thaliana.