Local Adaptations and Fitness of Transplants in the Lewis Flax – Flax Rust Coevolutionary System

Abstract

Disease progresses differently in varying environments. In coevolutionary interactions, species that interact frequently may adapt to their environment and to each other in a process called local adaptation. However, there may be trade-offs between adapting to the environment and to a coevolving partner. We used the host–pathogen system of Lewis flax and its coevolved fungal pathogen, flax rust, to study how the environment mediates adaptation to locally common pathogens. To separate these environmental and genetic effects, we placed sibling seedlings in their home environments, in different environments of similar elevation, and in environments of different elevations, and compared disease resistance to the local flax rust spores at the test site. We predicted that: 1) regardless of genetic resistance, lower elevation populations would present with less disease on average than higher elevation populations because of inhibitory effects of temperature; and 2) that seedling transplants would be more adapted to the locally common pathogens in their sites of origin than foreign transplants would be. This research will help us to disentangle the effects of the environment from geography on the Lewis Flax- Flax Rust system in the high mountain elevations at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. It will also contribute to the broader study of how hosts balance adapting to both pathogens and the abiotic environment. Building on previous studies of local adaptations across large scales, our experiment attempted to study local adaptation on a smaller scale in an effort to isolate the effects of genetic lineage from environmental changes to phenotypes.

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