This project aims to consolidate the Friberg Lab storage and compute needs. To better reflect the PI responsibilities of our collaboration with Anna Runemark, we propose to merge her storage project NAISS 2025/6-2, “The roles of polyploidization and selection in complex floral divergence in Lithophragma bolanderi” with our project NAISS 2025/6-96, “Floral scent genomics of Arabis alpina”. Both projects represent advanced collaborations between our laboratories, including former and future joint postdocs, PhD- and masters-students. We study the evolution of complex floral traits, and how these traits vary spatially in relation to natural selection driven by pollinator-mediated selection. After years of eco-evolutionary studies in the two plant model systems, we are now connecting the patterns emerging from a series of field-studies and crossing-experiments to the genomic underpinnings of floral trait variation. Both model systems exhibit tremendous floral scent and morphology variation, also at small spatial scales (Friberg et al. 2019, Petrén et al. 2021, Thosteman et al. 2024, Gross et al. 2025), allowing us to investigate their genomic underpinnings. In A. alpina, in collaboration with Katherine Eisen, we are preparing a series of studies to identify candidate regions explaining spatial floral scent variation, and to identify footprints of selection on these genomic regions. We have resequenced a large set of segregating F2-individuals, produced in crosses between highly scented A. alpina individuals, and “natural knockouts” emitting no detectable floral scent. We have performed a transcriptomics study (to be sequenced) to quantify the importance of gene expression variation for floral scent divergence, which means that we will generate new large dataset in need of storage resources. The ample sequence material was financed by grants from the Swedish Research Council (VR) to Friberg and from NSF to Eisen. In L. bolanderi, we have resequence-data available from a large set of phenotyped individuals from many populations, which also vary in ploidy level. The ploidy level variation opens an opportunity to study the genomic implications not only of filtering processes (natural selection, genetic drift), but also processes that generate novel variation. Thus, we study the importance of major genetic rearrangements, such as hybridization (Runemark et al. 2019) and polyploidization (Gross et al. 2025) for the origin of novel floral trait variation. The work is financed by a VR grant and a Tryggers postdoctoral scholarship (recruited in 2026) to Runemark. Our detailed knowledge about the ecological and evolutionary background allows us to address several unresolved questions about how complex traits like floral scent and morphology are molded and diversified through natural selection in combination and interaction with the underlying genomic architecture. Collectively we ask three main questions: 1. How does pollinator-mediated natural selection interact with and shape the genomes of spatially isolated populations? 2. What are the genomic origins and composition of different ploidy levels and is this genomic composition repeatable and predictive of phenotypes? 3. Are the patterns of gene expression, sub-genome dominance and diploidization consistent among ploidy levels, populations and/or polyploid origins?