Effect of DNA methylation, modified by 5-azaC, on ecophysiological responses of a clonal plant to changing climate.

Epigenetic regulation of gene expression is expected to be an important mechanism behind phenotypic plasticity. Whether epigenetic regulation affects species ecophysiological adaptations to changing climate remains largely unexplored. We compared ecophysiological traits between individuals treated with 5-azaC, assumed to lead to DNA demethylation, with control individuals of a clonal grass originating from and grown under different climates, simulating different directions and magnitudes of climate change.

The importance of ecophysiological traits in response of Festuca rubra to changing climate.

Knowledge of the ability of plants to respond to climate change via phenotypic plasticity or genetic adaptation in ecophysiological traits and of the link of these traits to fitness is still limited. We studied the clonal grass Festuca rubra from 11 localities representing factorially crossed gradients of temperature and precipitation and cultivated them in growth chambers simulating temperature and moisture regime in the four extreme localities. We measured net photosynthetic rate, F /F , specific leaf area, osmotic potential and stomatal density and length and tested their relationship to proxies of fitness.

Plant Origin, but Not Phylogeny, Drive Species Ecophysiological Response to Projected Climate.

Knowledge of the relationship between environmental conditions and species traits is an important prerequisite for understanding determinants of community composition and predicting species response to novel climatic conditions. Despite increasing number of studies on this topic, our knowledge on importance of genetic differentiation, plasticity and their interactions along larger sets of species is still limited especially for traits related to plant ecophysiology. We studied variation in traits related to growth, leaf chemistry, contents of photosynthetic pigments and activity of antioxidative enzymes, stomata morphology and photosynthetic activity across eight species growing along altitudinal gradients in Himalayas cultivated in three different temperature regimes and explored effects of among species phylogenetic relationships on the results.