Exploring genetic-based metabolic and morphological diversity of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes influenced by the environment

As concerns regarding climate change continue to rise, it is essential to understand how the environment affects the natural variation of existing biological diverse plants. Eight different Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes (Col-0, Bay-0, Bur-0, Tsu-1, Sha, Est-1, Cvi-0, and Ler-1) were grown under two different growth conditions, 18 °C and 24 °C, in order to understand how the effect of environmental stress (temperature) and genetic background impacts the organism's natural phenotypic variation. Morphometric analysis of morphological traits (root length, rosette area, inflorescence length, seed size and silique size) and metabolic profiling of aerial leaf tissue (extracellular lipids), closed flower buds and open flowers (non-targeted metabolite profiling) and dry seeds (fatty acids) using gas-chromatography mass-spectroscopy (GC-MS) were performed to determine the relative contributions temperature, genetics and the interaction between the two on these traits. Each controlling factor (temperature, genotype and the interactions between them) differentially affected characteristics of each measured morphological trait (root length, rosette area, inflorescence length), and temperature and the interactions between temperature and genotype governed metabolic traits (Figure 1).