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Plant Genome Size Influences Stress Tolerance Of Invasive And Native Plants Via Plasticity, Laura A. Meyerson, Petr Pyšek, Magdalena Lučanová, Sara Wigginton, Cao Tri Tran, James T. Cronin

Faculty Publications

© 2020 The Authors. Plant genome size influences the functional relationships between cellular and whole-plant physiology, but we know little about its importance to plant tolerance of environmental stressors and how it contributes to range limits and invasion success. We used native and invasive lineages of a wetland plant to provide the first experimental test of the Large Genome Constraint Hypothesis (LGCH)—that plants with large genomes are less tolerant of environmental stress and less plastic under stress gradients than plants with small genomes. We predicted that populations with larger genomes would have a lower tolerance and less plasticity to a …