Question

Can you elaborate on how increasing CO₂ concentrations can affect Arabidopsis thaliana and how it can respond to stress conditions and also predict how it will behave in future to any climate changes.

Answer 1

Ans 1- The effect of increasing carbon dioxide concentration on Arabidopsis thaliana is as follows-

Total shoot mass at the end of the vegetative growth period was increased due to short transient stimulation of relative growth by elevated carbon dioxide at the onset of exposure.

Seed production becomes higher.

Starch content of shoot increase substantially while soluble sugar content remain unaffected.

Total nitrogen content , on a dry mass basis decreases .

Photosynthesis is stimulated but acclimation of photosynthesis was not observed at elevated carbon dioxide.

Fitness of Arabidopsis thaliana increased by an increased reproductive output.

Ans 2- Response of Arabidopsis thaliana to stress conditions is as follows-

Lacking genetic variability .

Maternal and paternal inheritance .

Reversibility of transgenerational effects.

Heritable and potentially adaptive phenotypic changes , probably through epigenetic mechanisms.

Ans 3- Behaviour of Arabidopsis thaliana to any climate changes in future is as follows-

Arabidopsis thaliana will mainly undergo natural selection process.

As rainfall manipulation affected the fitness of natural lines from which selection along the genome was directly inferred. A significant portion of this climate driven natural selection over variants was predictable from signatures of local adaptation .