Advancing ecological and evolutionary research in Arabidopsis: Extending insights into model and nonmodel plants

Arabidopsis is regarded as the gold standard among plant systems because it has generated knowledge with translational potential across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the influence of less-explored fields within the Arabidopsis community, such as ecology and evolutionary ecology, has yet to be synthesized to emphasize their contributions to other plant disciplines. This essay summarizes current eco-evolutionary knowledge in Arabidopsis and highlights its potential to enrich the insights made by the Arabidopsis community as well as others working with other plant models and nonmodel systems. We underline the value of accession-based approaches but also highlight the importance for developing population-based approaches to understand how and where evolutionary change begins. Furthermore, we focus on the evolutionary value of phenotypic plasticity as necessary to comprehend the response of organisms to environmental changes. We also elaborate on conceptual and technical challenges to transcriptomic studies conducted in field conditions that evaluate gene function and gene effect on integrated phenotypes in natural environments. Overall, we believe that the development of joint eco-evolutionary and genetic research in Arabidopsis can help other plant species to develop as model systems, but the Arabidopsis community should also look at the advances of other emerging plant model systems.