caa a22 4500 528785923 20181123171919.0 cr unu---uuuuu 180924e20131114xx s 000 0 eng 10.3929/ethz-b-000074947 doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0080819 doi (ETHRESEARCH)oai:www.research-collection.ethz.ch:20.500.11850/74947 Suter Léonie Phenotypic Effects of Salt and Heat Stress over Three Generations in Arabidopsis thaliana [Elektronische Daten] [Léonie Suter, Alex; id_orcid 0000-0001-8253-5137 Widmer] PLoS ONE Open access ethresearch Current and predicted environmental change will force many organisms to adapt to novel conditions, especially sessile organisms such as plants. It is therefore important to better understand how plants react to environmental stress and to what extent genotypes differ in such responses. It has been proposed that adaptation to novel conditions could be facilitated by heritable epigenetic changes induced by environmental stress, independent of genetic variation. Here we assessed phenotypic effects of heat and salt stress within and across three generations using four highly inbred Arabidopsis thaliana genotypes (Col, Cvi, Ler and Sha). Salt stress generally decreased fitness, but genotypes were differently affected, suggesting that susceptibility of A. thaliana to salt stress varies among genotypes. Heat stress at an early rosette stage had less detrimental effects but accelerated flowering in three out of four accessions. Additionally, we found three different modes of transgenerational effects on phenotypes, all harboring the potential of being adaptive: heat stress in previous generations induced faster rosette growth in Sha, both under heat and control conditions, resembling a tracking response, while in Cvi, the phenotypic variance of several traits increased, resembling diversified bet-hedging. Salt stress experienced in earlier generations altered plant architecture of Sha under salt but not control conditions, similar to transgenerational phenotypic plasticity. However, transgenerational phenotypic effects depended on the type of stress as well as on genotype, suggesting that such effects may not be a general response leading to adaptation to novel environmental conditions in A. thaliana. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 ethresearch Widmer Alex; id_orcid 0000-0001-8253-5137 joint author PLoS ONE San Francisco, CA, USA : Public Library of Science 8 (11), p. e80819 1932-6203 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/74947 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) 1 Journal Article ethresearch ETHRESEARCH 856 40 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/74947 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) ETHRESEARCH 100 1- Suter Léonie ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Widmer Alex; id_orcid 0000-0001-8253-5137 joint author ETHRESEARCH 773 0- PLoS ONE San Francisco, CA, USA : Public Library of Science 8 (11), p. e80819 1932-6203 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH Journal Article Open access