Claudia Voelckel

Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology | ice · Department of Biochemistry

Plants defend themselves against attack by herbivores with a variety of physical and chemical defences, some of which also work by recruiting partners from the third trophic level. Despite the known or potential benefits of possessing defence traits, the expression of defence traits varies among tissues within individual plants, within and among pl...

Comparative transcriptomics and proteomics (T&P) have brought biological insight into development, gene function, and physiological stress responses. However, RNA-seq and high-throughput proteomics remain underutilised in studies of plant adaptation. These methodologies have created discovery tools with the potential to significantly advance our un...

Plants defend themselves against attack by herbivores with a variety of physical and chemical defences, some of which also work by recruiting partners from the third trophic level. Despite the known or potential benefits of possessing defence traits, the expression of defence traits varies among tissues within individual plants, within and among pl...

This latest volume in Wiley Blackwell's prestigious Annual Plant Reviews brings together articles that describe the biochemical, genetic, and ecological aspects of plant interactions with insect herbivores.. The biochemistry section of this outstanding volume includes reviews highlighting significant findings in the area of plant signalling cascade...

Predicting survival and extinction scenarios for climate change requires an understanding of the present day ecological characteristics of species and future available habitats, but also the adaptive potential of species to cope with environmental change. Hybridization is one mechanism that could facilitate this. Here we report statistical evidence...

The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of extraordinary zoological interest, being the only surviving member of an entire order of reptiles which diverged early in amniote evolution. In addition to their unique phylogenetic placement, many aspects of tuatara biology, including temperature-dependent sex determination, cold adaptation and ext...

FASTA file of assembled transcripts (after removal of potentially misassembled transcripts).

Comma-separated file (.csv) of BLAST results. The top BLAST hit against NCBI-NR, and Anolis, zebrafinch and chicken UniGene sets is shown, as is the result of the Full-Lengther analysis. (CSV 8736 kb)

Expression profiling has been proposed as a means for screening non-model organisms in their natural environments to identify genes potentially important in adaptive diversification. Tag profiling using high throughput sequencing is a relatively low cost means of expression profiling with deep coverage. However the extent to which very short cDNA s...

Transcriptome analysis is increasingly being used to study the evolutionary origins and ecology of non-model plants. One issue for both transcriptome assembly and differential gene expression analyses is the common occurrence in plants of hybridisation and whole genome duplication (WGD) and hybridization resulting in allopolyploidy. The divergence...

Figure S1. Number of complete transcripts identified in different assemblies of P. cheesemanii reads. 380 different assemblies were conducted using ABySS [25,26] and a combination of i) coverage cutoffs between 2 and 20 and II) k-mer sizes between 25 and 63. Transcripts covering the complete coding sequence of the homologue from A. lyrata or A. tha...

Table S1. Number and length of contigs per k-mer size and coverage cutoff for P. fastigiatum and P. cheesemanii. The number of sequences obtained per coverage cutoff were counted and divided into four size classes: a) Sequences that were longer than 1000 bp, b) sequences shorter than 1000 bp but longer than 500 bp, c) sequences shorter than 500 but...

Table S2. Statistics and longest sequences for 380 assemblies of the P. fastigiatum library. The longest sequence was identified in each of the 380 assemblies and annotated according to its homologue in A. thaliana. The N50 and N90 values for each assembly were computed as well.

Table S3. Coverage cutoff values for seven genes made from assemblies of reads which had up to three mismatches. All reads in the P. fastigiatum dataset mapping with up to three mismatches to the sequences of AT1G67090, AT3G14210, three sequences of AT1G54030 (two homeologues and one paralogue), ATCG00490, and AT1G75680 were determined and assemble...

Supplementary file S1: 3,912 complete annotated transcripts from the library of P. fastigiatum. Contigs from all 380 assemblies of the P. fastigiatum reads were searched against a combined library of A. lyrata and A. thaliana coding sequences using BLAT [47]. Transcripts that spanned more than 55% of a reference coding sequence were extracted and,...

Supplementary file S2: 2,442 complete annotated transcripts from the library of P. cheesemanii. Contigs from all 380 assemblies of the P. cheesemanii reads were searched against a combined library of A. lyrata and A. thaliana coding sequences using BLAT [47]. Transcripts that spanned more than 55% of a reference coding sequence were extracted and,...

The genus Pachycladon belongs to the Brassicaceae family and is comprised of species endemic to the South Pacific, specifically the South Island of New Zealand and Tasmania. The species in this genus are the product of a Pleistocene intertribal allopolyploidization event followed by rapid adaptive radiation and have been the focus of intense phylog...

The genus Pachycladon consists of ten species of alpine plants, nine of which are endemic to New Zealand. The species are closely related to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with respect to their sequence divergence and chromosome synteny, occupy distinct geographical habitats in terms of both latitude and altitude, and display a range of morph...

Figure S1. Figure S1 summarises individual and total glucosinolate contents of P. cheesemanii, P. exile and P. novae-zelandiae.

Table S1. Table S1 summarises expression statistics for differentially expressed transcripts and proteins. Six worksheets contain details on up-regulated transcripts and proteins in P. cheesemanii, P. exile and P. novae-zelandiae, respectively.

Table S2. Table S2 illustrates the microarray hybridization scheme.

Transcript profiling of closely related species provides a means for identifying genes potentially important in species diversification. However, the predictive value of transcript profiling for inferring downstream-physiological processes has been unclear. In the present study we use shotgun proteomics to validate inferences from microarray studie...

Differentially expressed genes in A. formosa (pre-anthesis) and A. thaliana (stages 12 and 15) flowers. Each square represents one contrast and reports the number of differentially genes, the corresponding false discovery rate as determined by bootstrap analysis in brackets and the number of differentially expressed genes adjusted for genes with hi...

Differentially expressed genes in stage 12 A. thaliana floral whorls. (1.57 MB XLS)

Spearman's rank correlation coefficients of array-wide expression of all pair wise combinations of whorls (* denotes p<0.001). In Aquilegia formosa (AF), most correlations are negative, except for a positive correlation of sepals and petals and no correlation between staminodia and sepals. In Arabidopsis thaliana (AT, stage 12), most correlations a...

Differentially expressed genes in stage 15 A. thaliana floral whorls. (1.65 MB XLS)

Differentially expressed genes in late pre-anthesis A. formosa floral whorls. (5.15 MB XLS)

The genus Aquilegia is an emerging model system in plant evolutionary biology predominantly because of its wide variation in floral traits and associated floral ecology. The anatomy of the Aquilegia flower is also very distinct. There are two whorls of petaloid organs, the outer whorl of sepals and the second whorl of petals that form nectar spurs,...

New Zealand is diverse in alpine and subalpine environments, a consequence of Late Tertiary tectonic and climatic change. However, few studies have sought to evaluate the importance of these environments as abiotic drivers in the diversification of plant species. Of particular interest is the Late Tertiary radiation of Pachycladon, an endemic New Z...

Transcriptome analysis using high-throughput short-read sequencing technology is straightforward when the sequenced genome is the same species or extremely similar to the reference genome. We present an analysis approach for when the sequenced organism does not have an already sequenced genome that can be used for a reference, as will be the case o...

Convergent phenotypes are testament to the role of natural selection in evolution. However, little is known about whether convergence in phenotype extends to convergence at the molecular level. We use the independent losses of floral anthocyanins in columbines (Aquilegia) to determine the degree of molecular convergence in gene expression across th...

The reproductive organs and mating biology of angiosperms exhibit greater variety than those of any other group of organisms. Flowers and inflorescences are also the most diverse structures produced by angiosperms, and floral traits provide some of the most compelling examples of evolution by natural selection. Given that flowering plants include r...

Outline The burgeoning of phylogenetic information during the past 15 years has focused much interest on whether specific features of clades enhance or hinder the evolution of species diversity. In the angiosperms many of the traits thought to affect clade diversity are floral in nature, because of their association with reproduction and thus speci...

Model systems have proven enormously useful in elucidating the biochemical function of plant genes. However their ecological function, having been sculpted by evolutionary forces specific to a species, may be less conserved across taxa. Responses to wounding and herbivore attack differ among plant families and are known to be mediated by oxylipin,...

Aphids have long been considered 'stealthy' herbivores that subvert a plant's induced defenses and manipulate its source-sink signaling, but these hypotheses are largely untested at a transcriptional level. We analysed gene expression in native tobacco plants (Nicotiana attenuata) infested with Myzus nicotianae aphids, without resorting to the use...

Abstract Unlike generalist herbivores, specialists are believed to share a history of evolutionary interactions with their host plants. We determine whether a specialist lepidopteran species alters plant metabolism differently from two generalist species despite similarities in feeding mode and larval elicitors. With a cDNA microarray enriched in d...

Summary Microarray technology has given plant biologists the ability to simultaneously monitor changes in the expression of hundreds of genes, and yet, to date, this technology has not been applied to ecological phenomena. In native tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), prior attack of sap-feeding mirids (Tupiocoris notatus) results in vaccination of the...

While simulations of herbivory with mechanical clipping provide many experimental advantages over true herbivory for ecological research, faithful mimicking can be onerous. Not only do herbivores differ in how and what they remove from a plant, but also they differ in saliva and regurgitate composition, microbial commensalists, pathogen vectoring,...

Differential display-reverse transcriptase PCR (DDRT-PCR) and subtractive hybridization with magnetic beads (SHMB) procedures were modified to compare the transcriptional responses of the postfire desert annual, Nicotiana attenuata when it is attacked by its two most abundant herbivores: the voracious Lepidopteran caterpillars of Manduca sexta and...

Several lines of evidence support the defensive function of nicotine production in the Nicotiana genus against a range of herbivores, but the evidence is largely correlative. To suppress nicotine production in planta and to test its defensive function, we expressed DNA of putrescine N-methyl transferase in an antisense orientation (AS-PMT) in N. sy...

Specialist herbivores are known to alter their host's wound-induced responses but the beneficiaries of these alterations are unknown. Nicotiana attenuata plants release a burst of ethylene specifically in response to feeding by Manduca sexta larvae, which is known to suppress wound- and methyl jasmonate (MeJA)-inducible nicotine accumulation. The e...