Simultaneous experiments pinpointed genetic variants associated with successful adaptation to climate change — and the tipping point beyond which plants can’t adapt.
For decades, ever since biologists recognized the potential environmental harms from climate change, they have worried that plants will not be able to evolve fast enough to adapt to a rapidly warming planet. But the pace of research to understand how species respond has been slow, typically based on single, stand-alone experiments by isolated research groups around the world.
Moisés (Moi) Expósito-Alonso grew frustrated with that approach. Instead, he and his colleagues created a network of fellow scientists to plant simultaneous experiments in 30 different climate zones around Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North America and allow them to evolve for five years, untended except for weeding. The goal of this unique experiment was to tease out how fast these plants — a genetically diverse mix of the common lab plant Arabidopsis thaliana, an annual within the mustard family — would evolve under different climate stresses, ranging from the snowy Alps to the heat of the Negev Desert.
Information about the speed of evolution, along with the genetic shifts that accompany it, are key to creating models that will help to identify the plants and animals at risk as their environments change around them, said Expósito-Alonso, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology.
“All of those species that are under protection, for example in natural parks, will still suffer from changing local climates, and we will need to devise some sort of strategy to understand their chances of novel climate adaptation by themselves, or perhaps even aid them,” he said. “My hope was to generate this quantitative data as a resource so that we can better understand rapid adaptation and make predictions, anticipate where are the risks, where might be the tipping points, where we have to pay attention. I think that without this fundamental understanding, we won’t be able to save them.”