A resurrection experiment finds evidence of both reduced genetic diversity and adaptive evolution in the agricultural weed Ipomoea purpurea
Adam Kuester, Shu-Mei Chang, Regina Baucom
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/024950

Despite the negative economic and ecological impact of weeds, relatively little is known about the evolutionary mechanisms that influence their ability to persist and thrive in agricultural fields. Here, we use a resurrection ecology approach and compare the neutral and adaptive genetic variation of temporally sampled seed progenies of Ipomoea purpurea, an agricultural weed that is resistant to glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in current-day agriculture. We found striking reductions in allelic diversity between cohorts sampled nine years apart, suggesting that populations of this species sampled from agricultural fields experience genetic bottleneck and/or founder events through time. We further found that populations of this species exhibit modest increases in herbicide resistance over time and evidence that this increase was due to adaptation and not genetic drift. Our results show that even in light of reduced genetic variation, populations of this noxious weed are capable of adapting to strong selection imparted by herbicide application. We likely uncovered only modest increases in resistance between sampling cohorts due to a strong and previously identified fitness cost of resistance in this species, along with the potential that non-resistant migrants germinate from the seed bank.