TY - JOUR A1 - Kloss, Lena A1 - Fischer, Markus A1 - Durka, Walter T1 - Land-use effects on genetic structure of a common grassland herb a matter of scale JF - Basic and applied ecology : Journal of the Gesellschaft für Ökologie N2 - The most common management practices in European grasslands are grazing by livestock and mowing for silage and hay. Grazing and mowing differ in their potential effects on plant gene flow and resulting population genetic structure. After assessing its breeding system, we investigated the effect of land use on the population genetic structure in the common grassland plant Veronica chamaedrys using 63 study populations on meadows, mown pastures and pastures in three regions in Germany, the so-called Biodiversity Exploratories. We determined plant density and analysed the genetic diversity, differentiation and small-scale genetic structure using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers. The breeding system of V chamaedrys turned out as self-incompatible and outcrossing. Its genetic diversity did not differ among land-use types. This may be attributed to large population sizes and the strong dispersal ability of the species, which maintains genetically diverse populations not prone to genetic drift. Genetic differentiation among populations was low (overall F(ST) = 0.075) but significant among the three regions. Land use had only weak effects on population differentiation in only one region. However, land use affected small-scale genetic structure suggesting that gene flow within plots was more restricted on meadows than on mown and unmown pastures. Our study shows that land use influences genetic structure mainly at the small scale within populations, despite high gene flow. KW - Biodiversity exploratories KW - Mowing KW - Grazing KW - AFLP KW - Veronica KW - Breeding system KW - Pollination experiment KW - Pollen-ovule ratio KW - Isolation by distance KW - Spatial autocorrelation Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.baae.2011.06.001 SN - 1439-1791 VL - 12 IS - 5 SP - 440 EP - 448 PB - Elsevier CY - Jena ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leimu, Roosa A1 - Kloss, Lena A1 - Fischer, Markus T1 - Inbreeding alters activities of the stress-related enzymes chitinases and beta-1,3-Glucanases JF - PLoS one N2 - Pathogenesis-related proteins, chitinases (CHT) and beta-1,3-glucanases (GLU), are stress proteins up-regulated as response to extrinsic environmental stress in plants. It is unknown whether these PR proteins are also influenced by inbreeding, which has been suggested to constitute intrinsic genetic stress, and which is also known to affect the ability of plants to cope with environmental stress. We investigated activities of CHT and GLU in response to inbreeding in plants from 13 Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi) populations. We also studied whether activities of these enzymes were associated with levels of herbivore damage and pathogen infection in the populations from which the plants originated. We found an increase in pathogenesis-related protein activity in inbred plants from five out of the 13 investigated populations, which suggests that these proteins may play a role in how plants respond to intrinsic genetic stress brought about by inbreeding in some populations depending on the allele frequencies of loci affecting the expression of CHT and the past levels of inbreeding. More importantly, we found that CHT activities were higher in plants from populations with higher levels of herbivore or pathogen damage, but inbreeding reduced CHT activity in these populations disrupting the increased activities of this resistance-related enzyme in populations where high resistance is beneficial. These results provide novel information on the effects of plant inbreeding on plant-enemy interactions on a biochemical level. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042326 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 7 IS - 8 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER -