Genetic diversity and climate adaption in "Arabidopsis lyrata"

Applied fields of research such as the one on global climate change has heightened the interest to understand the adaptive evolution process and limits to adaptive evolution. Progress in the field depends on knowing of the traits under selection and their genetic variation. The goal of my PhD thesis was to generally assess genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) diversity across an entire species geographic distribution and to detect SNPs and genes linked to adaptation to climatic variables and substrate type within the herbaceous plant Arabidopsis lyrata subsp. lyrata (A. lyrata). For this work, DNA of 52 populations covering the whole geographic range of A. lyrata were analyzed by pooling DNA of multiple individuals of each population, sequencing the pools (Pool-seq) and revealing population SNP frequencies. In the first chapter the wet-lab protocol of Pool-seq and the bioinformatics pipeline were tested. In the second chapter the genetic diversity of different genomic regions was analyzed to trace the history of the populations of A. lyrata. In the third chapter, the climatic variables that determine the ecological niche limits of the species distribution were defined. And, in the fourth chapter the SNP frequencies were associated with climatic variables and substrate type to detect the genomic regions involved in adaptation to climate and edaphic conditions, highlighting potentially relevant genes and pathways.