Publications by authors named "Henrique Valim"

Lichens can withstand fluctuating environmental conditions such as hydration-desiccation cycles. Many species distribute across climate zones, suggesting population-level adaptations to conditions such as freezing and drought. Here, we aim to understand how climate affects population genomic patterns in lichenized fungi.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Circadian regulation is linked to local environmental adaptation, and many species with broad climatic niches display variation in circadian genes. Here, we hypothesize that lichenizing fungi occupying different climate zones tune their metabolism to local environmental conditions with the help of their circadian systems. We study two species of the genus Umbilicaria occupying similar climatic niches (Mediterranean and the cold temperate) in different continents.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Intraspecific genomic variability affects a species' adaptive potential toward climatic conditions. Variation in gene content across populations and environments may point at genomic adaptations to specific environments. The lichen symbiosis, a stable association of fungal and photobiont partners, offers an excellent system to study environmentally driven gene content variation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Lichen-forming fungi establish stable symbioses with green algae or cyanobacteria. Many species have broad distributions, both in geographic and ecological space, making them ideal subjects to study organism-environment interactions. However, little is known about the specific mechanisms that contribute to environmental adaptation in lichen-forming fungi.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Lichen-forming fungi produce diverse natural products with medicinal properties, but their application in industry is limited due to the lack of knowledge about the genes responsible for these compounds.
  • A long-read sequencing and bioinformatics approach was employed to identify the biosynthetic gene cluster for gyrophoric acid (GA) across nine GA-producing species, revealing that the gene cluster is versatile and conserved only in a few key genes.
  • The findings indicate that different but structurally similar compounds are produced from the same biosynthetic cluster, highlighting potential pathways for biotechnological applications and drug discovery from lichen-derived compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The circadian clock contextualizes plant responses to environmental signals. Plants use temporal information to respond to herbivory, but many of the functional roles of circadian clock components in these responses, and their contribution to fitness, remain unknown. We investigate the role of the central clock regulator TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION 1 (TOC1) in Nicotiana attenuata's defense responses to the specialist herbivore Manduca sexta under both field and glasshouse conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Plant trait diversity is known to influence population yield, but the scale at which this happens remains unknown: divergent individuals might change yields of immediate neighbors (neighbor scale) or of plants across a population (population scale). We use plants silenced in mitogen-activated protein kinase 4 (irMPK4) - with low water-use efficiency (WUE) - to study the scale at which water-use traits alter intraspecific population yields. In the field and glasshouse, we observed overyielding in populations with low percentages of irMPK4 plants, unrelated to water-use phenotypes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The highly conserved core circadian clock component () contextualizes environmental stress responses in plants, for example by gating abscisic acid signaling and suppressing thermoresponsive growth. Selective interaction of TOC1 with PHYTOCHROME B under far-red-enriched light suggests a connection between circadian gating of light responses and sensitivity to ABA, an important regulator of growth and stress responses, including under drought. However, the fitness consequences of TOC1 function, particularly in the root, are poorly understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF