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Ecology & Evolution
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No Detectable Maternal Effects of Elevated CO2 on Arabidopsis thaliana Over 15 Generations
- Original article citation: PLoS ONE 4," e6035 ,
- Categories: Ecology & Evolution and Earth & Environment
- Recommended by: Yuhua Wang on 06/25/2009 02:47PM GMT
- Reasons for recommending:
The atmospheric CO2 concentration is projected to roughly double by the end of this century and the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration has appealed to many people and governments in the world. They wonder how future plants will respond to this global change. In response, many researchers have attempted to answer the question. Generally, they put current plants to elevated CO2 close to future atmospheric CO2 concentration and put forward the predictions based on experiment results within one generation of plants or a period of one generation. However, because plants may adapt to this global change in the long term, thus those predictions can be challenged. In order to solve this problem, the authors performed a fifteen-generation experiment to determine maternal effects of elevated CO2 plants over 5 years. The experiment design is very novel and original, and has never been reported previously. In addition, the results are very intriguing, suggesting that the maternal effects of elevated CO2 failed to extend to the offspring due to the potential lack of genetic variation for CO2 responsiveness, and future plants may not evolve specific adaptations to future elevated CO2. The results are contrast to many previous reports. Furthermore, the study provides a first experimental evidence to confirm the widely accepted assumption in many studies that plant responses to elevated CO2 observed within a single generation are similar to those observed over many generations. I do believe that the novel experimental design and interesting results will appeal scientific and popular readers, thus I recommend this article.
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The findings will be a useful addition to the literature in Global change biology.