Environmental Context of Phenotypic Plasticity in Flowering Time in Sorghum and Rice

Abstract Phenotypic plasticity is an important topic in biology and evolution. However, how to generate broadly applicable insights from individual studies remains a challenge. Here, with flowering time for sorghum and rice genetic populations observed from a large geographical region, we examined the consistency of parameter estimation for reaction norms of genotypes across different subsets of environments and searched for potential strategies to inform the study design. Both sample size and environmental mean range of the subset affected the consistency. The subset with either a large range of environmental mean or a large sample size resulted in genetic parameters consistent with the overall pattern. Furthermore, high accuracy through genomic prediction was obtained for reaction-norm parameters of untested genotypes using models built from tested genotypes under the subsets of environments with either a large range or sample size. With 1,428 and 1,674 simulated settings, our analyses suggested that the distribution of environmental index values of a site should be considered in designing experiments. Overall, we showed that environmental context was critical, and considerations should be given to better cover the intended range of the environmental variable. Our findings have implications to genetic architecture of complex traits, plant environmental interaction, and climate adaptation.