"The study of heritable variation in ecologically relevant plant traits can lead to insights into evolutionary processes and to increased agricultural output. Resource allocation strategies in flowering plants are of great interest, from an ecological and agricultural point of view. As plants have a modular body plan, they often initiate reproductive organs sequentially and the maternal plant has to balance current and future expenditures on offspring to produce an optimal number of seeds. Control mechanisms exerted by reproductive structures over maternal growth have been observed in several plant species -amongst them important crops- and are termed “correlative controls”. Such mechanisms might represent offspring begging strategies in plants, whereby offspring influences maternal resource allocation patterns. The molecular bases and ecological relevance of these control mechanisms are, however, unclear.The applicant aims to i) use state-of-the art molecular techniques to investigate correlative controls in an annual plant ii) isolate genetic variation in the strength of controls that offspring exerts over maternal growth ii) apply recently developed methods in ecological competition experiments to compare fitness parameters amongst offspring from genetic variants and examine genotype-environment interactions. This will provide an ecological context to formulate an evolutionary hypothesis concerning the adaptive value of correlative controls in plants.The interdisciplinary project will be implemented at the University of Zurich under supervision of Prof. Schmid, a world-renowned ecologist located at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Sciences. It will be co-supervised by Prof. Grossniklaus (Institute of Plant Biology), expert in plant reproductive biology and genetics. The project will be a major step in the research career of the applicant Samuel Wuest, towards professional maturity and expertise at the intersection between disciplines."