Water and Genome Size Effects on Germination and Seedling Growth of Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis
Additional Funding Sources
This project was made possible by the NSF Idaho EPSCoR Program and by the National Science Foundation under Award No. OIA-1757324.
Abstract
Artemisia tridentate (Big Sagebrush) is an ecologically important shrub in Western North America that provides important habitats for species including the Greater Sage Grouse and the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit that has experienced significant fragmentation. The basis of my experiment is to find a correlation between different water treatments and genome size. As genome size increases with whole-genome duplications (i.e. polyploidy), it can be believed that the effect leads to organismal nutrient requirements to also increase. A. tridentate appears much more responsive to irrigation for germination and plant growth. In theory if smaller genome size reacts better in an area with water scarcity, then restoration methods can have a better success rate vs a larger genome size that requires more.
In order to support this hypothesis, we planted A. tridentate ssp. wyomingensis seeds directly into containers and controlled the watering in a two crossed factor consisting of water frequency and water amount. Seeds were sourced from four populations with parent plants with known genome sizes, and we divided seeds from each parent plant into four sets. We then placed one of each set into the four treatment groups. We had a total of 50 sets of seeds ranging from 5.79 to 6.49 1C value, coming to a total of 200 seeds. We recorded whether the seeds germinated or not and the day of germination to calculate the number of days since planting. We also recorded seedling height as well as number of leaves every week in order to track plant growth. We will, at the end of the experiment, harvest seedlings to collect aboveground and belowground biomass.
We are yet to have any results on the experiment, but we are hoping to see the populations with smaller genome size react better to all water treatments as they do not require as many nutrients to grow. While we hope to see populations with larger genome size thrive better in the more frequent water treatments.
Water and Genome Size Effects on Germination and Seedling Growth of Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis
Artemisia tridentate (Big Sagebrush) is an ecologically important shrub in Western North America that provides important habitats for species including the Greater Sage Grouse and the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit that has experienced significant fragmentation. The basis of my experiment is to find a correlation between different water treatments and genome size. As genome size increases with whole-genome duplications (i.e. polyploidy), it can be believed that the effect leads to organismal nutrient requirements to also increase. A. tridentate appears much more responsive to irrigation for germination and plant growth. In theory if smaller genome size reacts better in an area with water scarcity, then restoration methods can have a better success rate vs a larger genome size that requires more.
In order to support this hypothesis, we planted A. tridentate ssp. wyomingensis seeds directly into containers and controlled the watering in a two crossed factor consisting of water frequency and water amount. Seeds were sourced from four populations with parent plants with known genome sizes, and we divided seeds from each parent plant into four sets. We then placed one of each set into the four treatment groups. We had a total of 50 sets of seeds ranging from 5.79 to 6.49 1C value, coming to a total of 200 seeds. We recorded whether the seeds germinated or not and the day of germination to calculate the number of days since planting. We also recorded seedling height as well as number of leaves every week in order to track plant growth. We will, at the end of the experiment, harvest seedlings to collect aboveground and belowground biomass.
We are yet to have any results on the experiment, but we are hoping to see the populations with smaller genome size react better to all water treatments as they do not require as many nutrients to grow. While we hope to see populations with larger genome size thrive better in the more frequent water treatments.