Study of the wheat genotypic variability for the improvement of grain yield and quality and its dependence on leaf carbon-nitrogen metabolism under elevated CO2 and high temperature

Abstract

Since the emergence of life on Earth, living beings have established complex relationships with other organisms and with the surrounding environment. These associations sometimes involve two or more lineages of organisms in which changes in one of these evolutionary trajectories conditionate the other. This process, called coevolution, occurs between organisms belonging to the same or different kingdoms and shows a wide spectrum of interactions going from mutualisms, in which the specialisation benefits both species, to hostile relationships. As sessile organisms, plants are subjected to numerous interactions with different organisms above- and below-ground, including animals, bacteria, fungi or viruses. Precisely, one of the first and more successful examples of coevolutionary systems described in literature implies the interaction stablished between plants and insects. Almost 298 million years ago, during the Permian period, pollinivory, the consumption of pollen by animals, took place firstly. Not long after, during early and mid-Cretaceous, pollination driven by insect was already the main strategy of angiosperm reproduction (Hu et al., 2008). Other examples of plant coevolution include the development of plant defence strategies against herbivore (i.e. resistance, tolerance, phenological escape and overcompensation), the recognition of chemical molecules in the mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobacteria symbiotic interactions, or the competitive genetic race established between the pathogenic-infection identification systems of plants and the ability of those pathogens to escape from that recognition.