Adaptation to a wide range of environments is a major driver of plant diversity. It is now possible to catalog millions of potential adaptive genomic differences segregating between environments within a plant species in a single experiment. Understanding which of these changes contributes to adaptive phenotypic divergence between plant populations is a major goal of evolutionary biologists and crop breeders. In this review, we briefly highlight the approaches frequently used to understand the genetic basis of adaptive phenotypes in plants, and we discuss some of the limitations of these methods. We propose that direct observation of the process of adaptation using multigenerational studies and whole genome sequencing is a crucial missing component of recent studies of plant adaptation because it complements several shortcomings of sampling-based techniques.

 摘 要 

适应各种各样的环境是植物多样性的主要驱动因素。现在已有可能在一次实验中，对一个植物物种适应不同环境的数百万种潜在适应性基因组差异位点进行鉴定与分析。理解这些变化中的哪些作用于植物种群之间的适应性表型差异，是演化生物学家和作物育种家的一个主要目标。本文中，作者简要综述了用于理解植物适应性表型遗传基础的常用方法，并讨论了这些方法的一些局限性。作者认为，利用多个世代的研究和全基因组测序来直接观察适应过程是目前亟需的研究手段，因为这两种方法可以有效弥补基于取样技术的若干缺点。