Tree co-occurrence and transcriptomic response to drought

Nathan G. Swenson (), Yoshiko Iida, Robert Howe, Amy Wolf, María Natalia Umaña, Krittika Petprakob, Benjamin L. Turner and Keping Ma ()
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Nathan G. Swenson: University of Maryland
Yoshiko Iida: Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute
Robert Howe: University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Amy Wolf: University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
María Natalia Umaña: University of Maryland
Krittika Petprakob: University of Maryland
Benjamin L. Turner: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Keping Ma: State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract The distribution and co-occurrence of species are partly the outcome of their interactions with environmental drivers. Drought is a key driver related to the distribution of plant species. Drought events continue to increase in frequency and severity and identifying those aspects of plant function that are related to drought is critical. Here, we perform a community-level analysis of gene expression in relation to experimental drought and relate the similarity in gene set enrichment across species to their natural co-occurrence. Species with similar gene set enrichment in response to experimental drought tend to non-randomly co-occur in a natural stand. We demonstrate that similarity in the transcriptomic response of species to drought is a significantly better indicator of natural co-occurrence than measures of functional trait similarity and phylogenetic relatedness and that transcriptomics has the capacity to greatly enhance ecological investigations of species distributions and community structure.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02034-w

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