Transgenerational effects might play an important role in the clonal plant Trifolium repens and are probably mediated by epigenetic variation. The growth and behavior of clonal plants might be affected not only by the ambient environment but also by environments that are no longer present at the time of clonal reproduction. This phenomenon can have yet unacknowledged ecological and evolutionary implications for clonal plants.
Environmentally induced epigenetic change enables plants to remember past environmental interactions. If this memory capability is exploited to prepare plants for future challenges, it can provide a basis for highly sophisticated behavior, considered intelligent by some. Against the backdrop of an overview of plant intelligence, we hypothesize: (1) that the capability of plants to engage in such intelligent behavior increases with the additional level of complexity afforded by clonality, and; (2) that more faithful inheritance of epigenetic information in clonal plants, in conjunction with information exchange and coordination between connected ramets, is likely to enable especially advanced intelligent behavior in this group. We therefore further hypothesize that this behavior provides ecological and evolutionary advantages to clonal plants, possibly explaining, at least in part, their widespread success. Finally, we suggest avenues of inquiry to enable assessing intelligent behavior and the role of epigenetic memory in clonal species.
Transgenerational effects (TGE) can modify phenotypes of offspring generations playing thus a potentially important role in ecology and evolution of many plant species. These effects have been studied mostly across generations of sexually reproducing species. A substantial proportion of plant species are however reproducing asexually, for instance via clonal growth. TGE are thought to be enabled by heritable epigenetic modification of DNA, although unambiguous evidence is still scarce. On the clonal herb white clover (Trifolium repens), we tested the generality of clonal TGE across five genotypes and five parental environments including soil contamination and above-ground competition. Moreover, by genome wide-methylation variation analysis we explored the role of drought, one of the parental environments that triggered the strongest TGE. We tested the induction of epigenetic changes in offspring generations using several intensities and durations of drought stress. We found that TGE of different environments were highly genotype specific and all tested environments triggered TGE at least in some genotypes. In addition, parental drought stresses triggered epigenetic change in T. repens and most of the induced epigenetic change was maintained across several clonal offspring generations. We conclude that TGE are common and genotype specific in clonal plant T. repens and potentially under epigenetic control.
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