I'm preparing some text about weed genomics and I want to emphasize the general biological importance of it rather than the importance of development of specific tools to study a plant group. What general biological questions can we answer if we sequence or study the genome of an invasive weed?Why it would be useful to perform such studies?
Hello Peter.
I believe this is a question regarding population genetics. Studying the genome of any organism population will help you determine how diverse they are. This in term can give you an idea of how much this population can adapt to change. This is mostly used in endangered species to determine how to mate them in captivity in order to produce a stronger population. So I believe this could be useful to determine the genetic elements that give this species the advantage over native plants. Of course, this is hard to determine, but it's a start.
Good luck!
If you care for a practical example you may have a look at weedy rice (for instance here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016189#pone-0016189-g005)
It could be interesting to search for genomic regions under selection, specifically involved with the "invasiveness". from both, fundamental and applied point of view, identifying why some species are prone to turn into invasive compared to others, is from great interest. it seems to me that these questions have been explored in animals but less in plants, albeit I am not sure...
Hi, thanks for the good comments. I was able to work this out with links/tips you provided. By providing a basic understanding of the genetic basis of weediness, weed genomes would also have scientific and societal impact through three predictable and useful outcomes. i) the identification of genes that could improve crop yields e.g. tolerance to soil and environmental conditions virtually absent from crops; ii) improving our understanding of the evolution of herbicide resistance and to aid in the identification of herbicide with novel mechanisms-of-action. Currently, there is little (if any) solid predictive capability of why some weeds develop resistance and others do not; iii) our understanding of weed biology would be exponentially expanded.
Very good question that only a few are looking into answering. For example almost 10 years ago, I collected seeds from a new weed that was spreading across the California desert and Southwest, the Saharan mustard Brassica tournefortii. I say "new" even though it was introduced in the town of Mecca in the date groves, until the 1990s, it really had just grow in place at that location.
Then there was research at UC Davis in the 1970s and 1980s to use B. tournefortii as breeding material to add genetic material to rapeseed as an oil crop. From 1997 when my desert surveys only found a single acre in the California deserts, to my 2005 survey found tens of thousands of acres covered, what caused that genetically?
Did the original 1920s Meccas material evolve to become more invasive, or was a new strain introduced during the rapeseed crossing investigations? You can view my seed collections to try and answer that question at http://www.ecoseeds.com/mustards.genetics.html.
Another issue in California is about the European annual weed grasses that spread within a few years in the 1800s to cover every nook and cranny across the State of California like Wild oats and Ripgut grasses--how did they do it?
Are the population genetically uniform or different genetic populations, and an important question, are they evolving genetically in their new lands?
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