Combined effects of drought stress and inbreeding on epigenetic inheritance and adaptive potential

Ongoing climate change and habitat fragmentation are among the most important threats to species and community persistence. The adaptive potential of species, and therefore their ability to cope with global environmental threats, is assumed to mainly depend on genetic variation underlying quantitative trait variation. However, recent advances in molecular ecology suggest an important role for epigenetic inheritance in adaptive ecological processes. Studying epigenetic inheritance in the presence of various environmental stressors is, however, notoriously challenging, requiring a unique experimental design involving crossings between plants (F1) experiencing different levels of drought and inbreeding, followed by epi-genotyping of offspring (F2) also raised in different drought conditions. Correspondingly, the goal of this project is to examine how drought and inbreeding affect epigenetic inheritance, epigenetic diversity and adaptive potential in Fragaria vesca, the woodland strawberry. F. vesca clones originating from various environmental settings will be raised and epi-genotyped in 2017 under FWO fellowship 12P6517N, thereby providing the necessary context to employ the proposed crossing framework and to epi-genotype a kinship- and inbreeding informed F2 generation. The implications of this research are diverse, from expanding our understanding of the molecular processes underlying eco-evolutionary dynamics, to developing epigenetically informed management strategies.