Accessions showed different degrees of ERD and FT plasticity in response to different environments
Our results showed that plasticity of different phenotypes to N availability are not under the control of the same loci, and that plasticity of specific phenotypes varied between the studied accessions. Next, we asked whether plasticities of ERD and FT are specific to certain environmental cues, or whether different accessions show similar plasticities in ERD and FT independent of the environmental changes. To investigate this question, we selected 19 accessions, covering the range from lowest to highest CVs for ERD and FT (Table S3). These accessions were grown at 20°C/16°C (day/night) in four additional environments known to impact plant growth, including long days (16h/8h) with low light (20 µE) and high light (750 µE), short day (8h/16h, 120 µE) and in the polytunnel with natural light and temperature conditions. Plants grown at 20°C/16°C (day/night) under long days with light intensity of 120 µE were used as control. In the polytunnel, the average temperature during the experiment was 26.2°C, with minimum of 11.5°C and maximum of 59.5°C. Each accession was scored for ERD and FT. To quantify the plasticity of ERD and FT in response to the different conditions, we calculated the FC between each condition to the control condition (Figure 6a, b; Table S7). To investigate whether the same accessions showed high plasticity in the phenotypes in response to all growth limiting conditions, we conducted a correlation analysis of the plasticities of ERD and FT in response to the different conditions for each accession (Figure 6c and 6d). We did not find any significant correlations between the FCs of the different environments, suggesting that the mechanisms underlying plasticities of ERD and FT to different environmental cues may be uncoupled from each other.