Meeting Abstract

31.6  Friday, Jan. 4  Relaxed, but ready: dormancy responses are the opposite of stress responses at the transcriptional level RAGLAND, GJ; University of Notre Dame gragland@nd.edu

Dormancy is a metabolically and developmentally supressed state that many organisms use to withstand stressful environments unfavorable for growth and reproduction. As an adaptation to extreme environmental stress, it is unsurprising that dormant life history stages almost universally exhibit enhanced resistance to multiple stressors compared to active, non-dormant stages. However, transcriptomic data show that at the level of global gene expression, the dormant/diapause phenotype is nearly the opposite of a stress response phenotype as illustrated by strong, consistent negative correlations. Here I present these patterns both within and across species and discuss functional explanations and evolutionary implications.