Sonia E. Sultan, Associate of the Arnold Arboretum
Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science, Wesleyan University
Contact
- Address:
- 1300 Centre Street
Boston, MA 02130
Biography

I study individual plasticity–how developing plants adjust their phenotypes and those of their offspring in alternative environmental conditions, often in adaptive ways. Through greenhouse and growth chamber experiments using local Polygonum genotypes as a naturally evolved model system, my group characterizes the breadth of phenotypic response to ecologically realistic environmental challenges such as drought stress and shade, including the epigenetically mediated transgenerational effects of these stresses on offspring phenotypes. Together, these findings illuminate the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors in plant development and raise questions about the nature of variation, heredity, and the process of evolution more broadly. I have explored these questions in my 2015 book Organism and Environment and in mathematical and simulation models testing the impact of plasticity on adaptive evolution. My group has also studied the relation of individual plasticity to invasiveness, and the rapid evolution of plastic response patterns. Current projects include (a) the relation of alloploidy to breadth of plastic response (in collaboration with the Eaton lab at Columbia), and (b) rapid evolution in a clonal plant (in collaboration with the Verhoeven lab at NIOO, Wageningen).