In the past 50 million years climate cooling has triggered the expansion of temperate biomes. During this period, many extant plant lineages in temperate biomes evolved from tropical ancestors and adapted to seasonality and cool conditions. Among the Poaceae (grass family), one of the subfamilies that successfully shifted from tropical to temperate biomes is the Pooideae (temperate grasses). Subfamily Pooideae contains the most important crops cultivated in the temperate regions including wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Due to the need of well-adapted cultivars, extensive research has produced a large body of knowledge about the mechanisms underlying cold adaptation in cultivated Pooideae species. Especially cold acclimation, a process which increases the frost tolerance during a period of non-freezing cold, plays an important role. Because cold adaptation is largely unexplored in lineages that diverged early in the evolution of the Pooideae, little is known about the evolutionary history of cold acclimation in the Pooideae. Here we test if several species of early diverging lineages exhibit increased frost tolerance after a period of cold acclimation. We further investigate the conservation of five well-studied gene families that are known to be involved in the cold acclimation of Pooideae crop species. Our results indicate that cold acclimation exists in early diverging lineages, but that genes involved in regulation of cold acclimation are not conserved. The investigated gene families show signs of lineage-specific evolution and support the hypothesis that gene family expansion is an important mechanism in adaptive evolution.

Evolution of cold acclimation in temperate grasses (Pooideae)