Polyploidy, morphology, and systemic fungal endophyte frequencies of Festuca rubra L. in a broad scale geographic distribution.

DIRIHAN, S.; HELANDER, M.; SALONIEMI, I.; VÄRE, H. ; GUNDEL, P.E.; SAIKKONEN, K.

Lausanne

Simposio; 15th Meeting of The European Society for Evolutionary Biology; 2015

We conducted studies of ploidy levels and presence of systemic fungal endophyte infection in the grassFestuca rubra L. across latitudes from Spain to northernmost Finland and Greenland. First we implementeda time- and cost-efficient flow cytometry procedure which is based on to use a plate-based analysis with afully automated software tools. Using this procedure we analyzed 29 F. rubra populations. Most of the plantswere hexaploids (2n=42; 83%), but also tetraploid (2n=28; 10%) and octoploid (2n=56; 7 %) plants weredetected. While ploidy levels seemed to be positively correlated with latitude, we could not detect explicitgeographic gradients. The endophyte infection frequencies of plants varied from 0% to 81%. Our resultssuggest that variation in infection frequencies and ploidy levels might partly reflect Festuca distribution afterthe glaciation period, and be partly the consequences of local selective forces. We also analyzedmorphological characters of 17 F. rubra populations from a broad latitudinal gradient across Europe. Wefound correlations among some morphological measurements and ploidy; e.g. the correlation between basalleaf width and plant height was strong for tetraploids and octoploids, but not for hexaploids. Our resultssuggest that selection favored similar morphology in each study site in spite of different ploidy levels.