Chris Oakley
Title:
Assistant Professor
PhD Granting Institution:
Florida State University
Contact:
Email Address: oakleyc@purdue.edu
Office Phone: (765) 494-9644
Lab Website Link: https://btny.purdue.edu/labs/oakley/
Primary Training Group:
Plant Biology
Research Areas:
Abiotic stress tolerance, genotype by environment interactions, heterosis, and mating system evolution in plants.
Current Projects:
We address questions such as: What are the traits and genes that allow plants to adapt to local environmental conditions? Does adaptation to one environment result in a fitness cost in other environments? and What are the constraints on adaptation and population persistence, particularly in the face of environmental change? One research focus is the genetic and physiological mechanisms of cold acclimation. This is a common adaptation in temperate zone plants where responses to cool autumn temperatures condition winter freezing tolerance, but it is likely to be energetically costly and require precise adjustment based on predictable environmental cues. A trade-off for cold acclimation can limit where native species and crops can thrive, and climatic variability can disrupt the capacity of plants to “predict” their future environment. Current work in the lab uses locally adapted populations of Arabidopsis thaliana to examine the transcriptional, metabolic, and fitness consequences of a naturally occurring sequence polymorphism in CBF2, a gene that encodes a major regulator of cold acclimated freezing tolerance, and represents a genetic trade-off in this study system. This mechanism of regulating cold acclimation may be broadly conserved across plants because orthologues of CBF genes are cold responsive in many plant lineages. We have initiated projects to examine the costs of cold acclimation in the emerging perennial models Populus and Plantago. A second research focus is the potential constraints on historical and contemporary adaptation. Small population sizes, spatial isolation, and inbreeding are all common in plant populations and limit beneficial genetic variation, and increase the chance fixation of deleterious alleles. Current projects in the lab use heterosis, or the increased fitness of crosses between lines/populations, to infer patterns of fixation of deleterious alleles in several different contexts and species. Some of these projects include: Mapping the genetic basis of heterosis and heterosis by environment interactions in Arabidopsis thaliana, Investigating the role of heterosis in maintaining outcrossing in the highly selfing Ruellia humilis, and using heterosis to evaluate seed sourcing strategies for prairie restoration using remnant populations of Silene regia.
Importance of Interdisciplinary Research:
Addressing big questions and challenges often requires working across levels of biological organization and/or spatial and temporal scales with a diverse toolkit. Interdisciplinary research is an opportunity for the emergent properties of a research team to make ground breaking progress that is greater than the sum of their specific individual contributions.