Full species-wide leaf and seed ionomic diversity of<i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i>

Summary Soil is a heterogenous reservoir of essential elements needed for plant growth and development. Plants have evolved mechanisms to balance their nutritional needs based on availability of nutrients. This has led to genetically-based variation in the elemental composition ‘ionome’, of plants, both within and between species. We explore this natural variation using a panel of wild-collected, geographically widespread Arabidopsis thaliana accessions from the 1001 Genomes Project including over 1,135 accessions, and the 19 parental accessions of the Multi-parent Advanced Generation Inter-Cross (MAGIC) panel, all with full-genome sequences available. We present an experimental design pipeline for high-throughput ionomic screenings and analyses with improved normalisation procedures to account for errors and variability in conditions often encountered in large-scale, high-throughput data collection. We report quantification of the complete leaf and seed ionome of the entire collection using this pipeline and a digital tool-IonExplorer to interact with the dataset. We describe the pattern of natural ionomic variation across the A. thaliana species and identify several accessions with extreme ionomic profiles. It forms a valuable resource for exploratory QTL, GWA studies to identify genes underlying natural variation in leaf and seed ionome and genetic adaptation of plants to soil conditions.