Maintaining agricultural production under changing weather patterns has become an increasingly pressing goal to ensure stable food supplies for the growing world population. Maize and sorghum are among the major crops of tropical origin that are critical for food security across the globe. Both are susceptible to environmental stressors in temperate growing regions, such as low temperatures.
Fig 1: Inflorescence characteristics and latitude distribution of Zea and Tripsacum.
Wild maize relative Tripsacum dactyloides is a valuable source of variation for stress tolerance in maize for several reasons: tripsacum is a close relative of maize; it shares a recent whole genome duplication that generates new variation for stress tolerance, and it naturally evolved in an inherently stressful temperate environment than maize without domestication and artificial selection bottleneck. Previous work in the Schnable lab at the University of Nebraska has shown the differential responses of orthologous genes in tripsacum to chilling stress. These orthologs in tripsacum also show signs of faster protein sequence evolution and overlap with artificially selected genes in maize for temperate growth (Yan et al. 2019).
However, genetic variation within tripsacum is underexplored. We aim to characterize the extent of genetic and epigenetic variation for abiotic stress tolerance in tripsacum. This work will help better understand the evolution of stress-response and ‘growth-stress’ trade-offs in stress-adapted crop-wild relatives and use them as potential germplasm sources to improve crops’ tolerance to environmental extremes.