Not-So-Abstract Abstract

Plant development is influenced by the environment around it, and in Arabidopsis thaliana, these extra organismal development factors can be transmitted across generations. While it is known that both ancestral and offspring environment impacts development, the magnitude to which each acts is unknown. To assess the ancestral environmental impact on offspring development, the grandparental generation is grown in a warm and cool temperature, and offsprings of each respective environment are then also grown in warm and cool temperature to give 4 scenarios. Finally, for the last generation, we take the 4 different parental and self-pollinate them to give 8 possible scenarios. We expect to see the offspring environment to have the largest influence on offspring development followed by parental and grandparental, respectively.The variation in the magnitude of transgenerational environmental effects between different genotypes are also not well characterized. For these set of experiments, we grew 8 genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana in both warm and cool temperature for the grandparental generation and ambient conditions for the parental and offspring generation. We expect the different genotypes to have different propensities to have transgenerational environmental effects.