My research aims to characterize the local environment of Arabidopsis. For this, we first created what we now describe as the “1001 environomes”, codifying environmental data for more than 200 environmental variables that provide a description of the local environment of the specie. The next logical step was to characterize the genome-wide genetic variation associated with these environmental variables (G×E). For this, I conducted GWAS analysis using each one of the environmental variables I extracted and considering it as a ‘phenotype.’ This analysis facilitates the study of the genetic basis of local adaptation in Arabidopsis. We then uncovered the genetic and phenotypic basis of local adaptation in Arabidopsis by relating 131 different Arabidopsis phenotypes with the set of environmental variables we characterized. This work has been recently published (Ferrero-Serrano and Assmann 2019), and combines the application of remote sensing, genomics, phenomics, whole plant physiology, and GWA techniques. I created a series of online tools for the study of the study of local adaptation in Arabidopsis that we named “Arabidopsis CLIMtools."

My current research aims to make use of the tools we provided for the study of local adaptation in Arabidopsis though a series of common garden experiments that aim to discover adaptive loci in relation to phenotypic traits and environmental variables that are relevant from an agronomic perspective.