Retention and functional adaptation of duplicated genes during the evolution of plant stress response

Basic data for this project

Description

One of the fundamental paradigms in evolutionary biology is that gen eduplication facilitates novelty. In a changing environment, adaptationis often driven by expression divergence between the two paralogsfollowing an initial duplication event. The aim of this project is toextend the understanding of the evolution of genes that facilitate adaptation to changing environments in plants, primarily in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. In particular, it is aimed to study the effects of different duplication modes on gene evolution along withthe nature of their functional development (neo- vs. sub-functionalization). Here, the focus will be on genes related to the stress response system of plants which is composed of the three stages of reception, signalling, and transcriptional response. Each of these stagescan be shaped by different evolutionary properties such as retention rates or sequence and/or expression divergence. Understanding how the evolution of duplicated genes forms the stress system of plants will help us to understand how nature coordinates adaptation to a changing environment.