Live or let die? Deciphering the developmental and genetic basis for transitions between perenniality and annuality in temperate grasses

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2020

End date

12/31/2026

Budget

1,475,877 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Imagine letting yourself die to avoid a stressful situation, just to return when the situation has calmed. It sounds like magic, but this is essentially what numerous plants do to avoid stressors like drought and frost when they adopt an annual growth habit. The alternative strategy is to adopt coping mechanisms to live through many seasons, referred to as the perennial growth habit. These two strategies require fundamentally different physiology. Annuals have high growth rates, large leaf area, large allocation of resources to reproductive structures and high biomass production. Perennials have traits allowing for persistence and defense, like high tissue density and allocation of higher proportion of biomass into roots. Due to physiological differences between annuals and perennials, agricultural practices for annual crops put pressure on the sustainability of agricultural systems: the less developed root systems in annuals often make them less efficient in water and nutrient uptake as compared to perennials, they are less resistant to weeds and pests and they need to be sown every year, which require more tillage. Given the demand for increased, but sustainable food production, combining the crop output of an annual with the persistence abilities of a perennial by breeding perenniality into annual crop species would contribute to meet this demand. Even with the fundamental differences in growth strategies, the evolutionary distance between annual and perennial species may be very small, indicating that small differences in genetic makeup differentiate the growth habits. However, what these differences are is to a large degree unknown. Each tiller in the plant is annual such that in an annual plant, all tillers flower within one season. For a perennial plant, some tillers will flower within a season, but some tillers must live on to the next season. How this happens is unknown. It could be that the tillers flower by age such that the oldest tiller flower first, or it could be that there is some other pattern. Progress in breeding perenniality into annuals is hampered by our limited knowledge about the developmental and genetic mechanisms underlying growth habits. In this project we will decipher the genetic bases for annual and perennial life history strategies and determine how development is influenced by these genes.