# Metabolic plasticity and adaptive evolution in Fragaria vesca: bridging wild diversity to crop improvement

## TL;DR

This paper explores how the woodland strawberry adapts to environmental changes through metabolism and genetic variation, offering insights for improving crop resilience.

## Contribution

The paper integrates metabolomics and genomics to reveal how wild genetic diversity can be used to enhance crop resilience.

## Key findings

- Adaptive phenotypic plasticity and genetic variation in Fragaria vesca contribute to environmental adaptation.
- Metabolomic GWAS identifies genetic loci linked to metabolite variation and pathway diversity.
- Wild genetic resources can be leveraged to improve crop resilience in changing environments.

## Abstract

Plants resilience capacity to environmental variability involves both phenotypic plasticity and genetic differentiation through evolutionary selection. Metabolism, particularly primary metabolism, plays a central role in the plant-environment interface, translating environmental and genetic signals into physiological, developmental, morphological and life history responses. The woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca, serves as an ideal model system for studying these integrated processes due to its wide ecological distribution, high natural variation, sequenced diploid genome, and experimental tractability. This has resulted in a growing interest in integrating approaches from ecophysiology, metabolomics, and genomics to dissect these complex interactions. This review presents current knowledge on how adaptive phenotypic plasticity and genetic variation contribute to environmental adaptation in plants, with a particular focus on F. vesca, discussing insights from studies examining plasticity along environmental gradients and from metabolomic genome-wide association studies (mGWAS), which integrate metabolomic profiling with GWAS to identify genetic loci underlying metabolite variation and metabolic pathway diversity. This integrative understanding provides a roadmap for leveraging wild genetic resources to enhance crop resilience in changing environments.