Format: ORAL

Ya-Long Guo

State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China. yalong.guo@ibcas.ac.cn

How organisms adapt to climate change is a fundamental biological question. High throughput genome sequencing of A. thaliana and its closely related species speed up the studies of plant adaptive evolution. Transposable elements (TEs) are a type of repetitive DNA sequence mobilizing across the genome, which consists of a large fraction of the genome size, and its mobilization could rapidly produce large-effect mutations. However, there are many questions about TEs, for example, how TEs insertion affect gene and phenotypic variation, what are the driving forces of TE load variation, and how did the genetic load of TEs vary during range expansion. Based on the genomics and genetics analyses of Arabidopsis thaliana and its relatives, we demonstrated that TEs are an important source of genetic variation that could account for high phenotypic diversity, and could plays important roles in the process of adaptive evolution. In addition, we revealed that effective population size, high transposition rate, and selective sweeps contributed to TE accumulation in the expanded populations. In particular, we genetically mapped and identified multiple candidate causal genes and TEs, and revealed the genetic architecture of TE load variation. Overall, our results highlight TEs could play a crucial role in the process of adaptation.