Copyright 2014 Accademia dei Georgofili
Whole-genomes of a individual pool of each variety that constitute a species define the resource for the adaptability of the species itself to the ambient. The adaptability might be evaluated as an index of the plasticity of one species. The plasticity can therefore be meant as the binomial possibility/opportunity that allows the plant to interact with other organisms and environmental factors. In cultivated plants, the appearance of mutations might generate new possibility, giving origin to new opportunity of adaptation in one species and, therefore, a new variety could appear. Olive panicle and flower development, fruit set and secondary metabolites biosynthesis in the fruit are an excellent examples of phenotypic plasticity. Flowers number and panicle structure varies among inter- and intra-variety, generating a population of inflorescence models, which resulted to be strongly linked to different gene expression of olive Blind, RAX1, RAX2 and RAX3, observed. These gene coding for transcription factors regulating the branching, of panicle. Fruit-set occurs with a different frequency among olive varieties, depending to the ovary position within panicle, and epigenetic and genetic factors are responsible. Secondary metabolites playing a role in many plant physiological process, as biotic and abiotic stress adaptation and ontogenic development of an organ, under different development stage and environmental conditions are dependent from the historical evolution of each variety and its plasticity off adaptation. The analysis of gene expression data, in our studies, has shown that transcriptionally coordinated (co-expressed) genes are often functionally related, enabling us to use expression data in gene function prediction.
