Since the emergence of life on Earth, living beings have established complex relationships with other organisms and with the surrounding environment. These associations sometimes involve two or more lineages of organisms in which changes in one of these evolutionary trajectories conditionate the other. This process, called coevolution, occurs between organisms belonging to the same or different kingdoms and shows a wide spectrum of interactions going from mutualisms, in which the specialisation benefits both species, to hostile relationships. As sessile organisms, plants are subjected to numerous interactions with different organisms above- and below-ground, including animals, bacteria, fungi or viruses. Precisely, one of the first and more successful examples of coevolutionary systems described in literature implies the interaction stablished between plants and insects. Almost 298 million years ago, during the Permian period, pollinivory, the consumption of pollen by animals, took place firstly. Not long after, during early and mid-Cretaceous, pollination driven by insect was already the main strategy of angiosperm reproduction (Hu et al., 2008). Other examples of plant coevolution include the development of plant defence strategies against herbivore (i.e. resistance, tolerance, phenological escape and overcompensation), the recognition of chemical molecules in the mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobacteria symbiotic interactions, or the competitive genetic race established between the pathogenic-infection identification systems of plants and the ability of those pathogens to escape from that recognition.

El presente trabajo ha sido financiado a través de los proyectos AGL2013-41363-R y AGL2016-79589-R concedidos por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, así como los proyectos CSI083U16 otorgado por la Junta de Castilla y León (JCyL) y cofinanciado por el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional. Emilio Luis Marcos Barbero ha disfrutado de una ayuda para la contratación predoctoral de personal investigador financiada por la JCyL y el Fondo Social Europeo (E-37-2017-0066125), de un contrato “CLU-2019-05 – Unidad de Excelencia IRNASA-CSIC”, financiado por la JCyL y la Unión Europea (FEDER “Europa impulsa nuestro crecimiento”) y de una ayuda para la realización de una estancia en el centro INRA-Aquitainte de Burdeos (Francia), concedida por la 2nd Call for Transnational Access to European Plant Phenotyping Facilities EPPN2020 European Commission (ID 178)

324 páginas, material suplementario (21 tablas, 10 figuras). -- Tesis doctoral. Universidad de Salamanca. Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Salamanca-CSIC. Leída, 16-02-2022

Peer reviewed