Markus Pfenninger, Friederike Reuß, Angelika Kiebler, Philipp Schönnenbeck, Cosima Caliendo, Susanne Gerber, Berardino Cocchiararo, Sabrina Reuter, Nico Blüthgen, Karsten Mody, Bagdevi Mishra, Miklós Bálint, Marco Thines, Barbara Feldmeyer
- In the course of global climate change, central Europe is experiencing more frequent and prolonged periods of drought. The drought years 2018 and 2019 affected European beeches (Fagus sylvatica L.) differently: even in the same stand, drought damaged trees neighboured healthy trees, suggesting that the genotype rather than the environment was responsible for this conspicuous pattern. We used this natural experiment to study the genomic basis of drought resistance with Pool-GWAS. Contrasting the extreme phenotypes identified 106 significantly associated SNPs throughout the genome. Most annotated genes with associated SNPs (>70%) were previously implicated in the drought reaction of plants. Non-synonymous substitutions led either to a functional amino acid exchange or premature termination. A SNP-assay with 70 loci allowed predicting drought phenotype in 98.6% of a validation sample of 92 trees. Drought resistance in European beech is a moderately polygenic trait that should respond well to natural selection, selective management, and breeding.
