TY - JOUR
T1 - Century-scale Methylome Stability in a Recently Diverged Arabidopsis thaliana Lineage
AU - Hagmann, Jörg
AU - Becker, Claude
AU - Müller, Jonas
AU - Stegle, Oliver
AU - Meyer, Rhonda C.
AU - Wang, George
AU - Schneeberger, Korbinian
AU - Fitz, Joffrey
AU - Altmann, Thomas
AU - Bergelson, Joy
AU - Borgwardt, Karsten
AU - Weigel, Detlef
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Hagmann et al.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - There has been much excitement about the possibility that exposure to specific environments can induce an ecological memory in the form of whole-sale, genome-wide epigenetic changes that are maintained over many generations. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, numerous heritable DNA methylation differences have been identified in greenhouse-grown isogenic lines, but it remains unknown how natural, highly variable environments affect the rate and spectrum of such changes. Here we present detailed methylome analyses in a geographically dispersed A. thaliana population that constitutes a collection of near-isogenic lines, diverged for at least a century from a common ancestor. Methylome variation largely reflected genetic distance, and was in many aspects similar to that of lines raised in uniform conditions. Thus, even when plants are grown in varying and diverse natural sites, genome-wide epigenetic variation accumulates mostly in a clock-like manner, and epigenetic divergence thus parallels the pattern of genome-wide DNA sequence divergence.
AB - There has been much excitement about the possibility that exposure to specific environments can induce an ecological memory in the form of whole-sale, genome-wide epigenetic changes that are maintained over many generations. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, numerous heritable DNA methylation differences have been identified in greenhouse-grown isogenic lines, but it remains unknown how natural, highly variable environments affect the rate and spectrum of such changes. Here we present detailed methylome analyses in a geographically dispersed A. thaliana population that constitutes a collection of near-isogenic lines, diverged for at least a century from a common ancestor. Methylome variation largely reflected genetic distance, and was in many aspects similar to that of lines raised in uniform conditions. Thus, even when plants are grown in varying and diverse natural sites, genome-wide epigenetic variation accumulates mostly in a clock-like manner, and epigenetic divergence thus parallels the pattern of genome-wide DNA sequence divergence.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004920
DO - 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004920
M3 - Article
C2 - 25569172
AN - SCOPUS:84922377811
SN - 1553-7390
VL - 11
JO - PLoS genetics
JF - PLoS genetics
IS - 1
M1 - e1004920
ER -