PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #90: Evolutionary Ecology.
Presiding: R. del Castillo
Thursday, August 8. 1:00 PM to 3:45 PM. Apache Meeting Room, TCC.

Response to fine versus coarse grained water stress in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Engelmann, Kathleen^*,1, Schlichting, Carl¹, ¹ University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

ABSTRACT- Organisms routinely experience both coarse grained and fine grained environmental variation. However, most studies of plastisticy only look at course grained variation. Our study looked at the response of 17 ecotypes and two mutant strains of Arabidopsis thaliana in response to fine and coarse grained water stress. We found that the response to the two types of variation differed by the number of traits affected, the intensity of the response, the direction of the response and the sensitivity to genetic background. These results suggest that temporal scale of environmental variation is an important determinant in adaptive evolutionary mechanisms.

KEY WORDS: environmental grain, water stress, Arabidopsis thaliana