Cloning and analysis of loci responsible for the quantitative variation of growth and response to the environment in Arabidopsis thaliana

Growth is a complex trait that integrates many cellular and physiological functions, as well as numerous external (environmental) signals. As a consequence, plant growth varies considerably between and within species in a given environment. Besides, as crop productivity is mainly limited by abiotic stresses such as drought and osmotic stress, and considering the increasing worldwide food demand, understanding the regulation of plant response to abiotic stress remains a major issue of the 21st century. Using natural variation in Arabidopsis thaliana as a source of biodiversity and growth as an ultimate integrative trait summing up responses to the environment, the objective of this project is to find new genes involved in plant response to drought and osmotic stress and to understand the genetic mechanisms by which sequence polymorphisms quantitatively affect growth. Besides, a fraction of the variation for stress response observed among wild Arabidopsis populations should actually correspond to adaptation to specific environmental conditions and should help to reveal how evolution shapes natural variation.

PhD subject IJPB 2010 from research group Variation and Abiotic Stress Tolerance