Skip to main content

Genomics of Developmental Plasticity in Animals

Recently, in class we have been discussing plasticity in a variety of different environments and functions. Phenotypic plasticity plays a very important role in organisms ability to respond to new environments and situations. I read a review the other day from Frontiers in Genetics, discussing the impact of genomics on developmental plasticity, and the effects that this plasticity can have upon adaptation in later life. 

One of the most interesting things about the review for me was the discussion about the potential mitigating effects of plasticity on the detrimental impacts of future climate change. As climate change progresses, it is likely that temperatures will fluctuate, and many biomes will change drastically in a relatively short period of time. As these changes occur, organisms will have to adapt, die out, or migrate. When organisms are forced to adapt it can be an enormous benefit to be more "plastic" in terms of traits. Greater plasticity allows an organism to survive in a greater range of environments and allows them to endure a greater variety of conditions. One particular example of this is when a change in climate alters the visual environment, resulting in an organism's camouflage being less effective than it was previously. A greater degree of plasticity in camouflage variety can help a predator catch prey, or a prey species avoid predators in a new environment. If a species does not have this plasticity in appearance they can easily appear out of place, and are much more easily spotted. And while organisms may already have to adapt to new climates and environments, in the future it will be a much greater requirement, and the pace at which changes occur will be much greater. Those species that cannot change will likely vanish. Greater degrees of plasticity are often genetic and heritable, so that more plastic parents will have more plastic offspring. By this process the whole population will generally become more and more plastic in a rapidly changing environment.

Lafuente E, Beldade P. 2019. Genomics of Developmental Plasticity in Animals. Frontiers in Genetics 10, doi: 10.3389/fgene.2019.00720

Comments

  1. TuckerMarch 18, 2021 at 12:31 PM

    I completely agree, with the climate changing many species will have to adapt (increase plasticity), migrate, or die. There has to be costs to plasticity though, if not then species will be selected for maximum plasticity which we don't observe. Species have select ranges of plasticity to specific stressors, so what is the cost? T. J. DeWitt tested phenotypic cost in freshwater snails where he found growth rates of snail shell sizes were inversely related to their genetic potential for a plastic response to predator presence. He has written other papers as well questioning the costs of phenotypic plasticity, where there are a number of theories. One prevailing theory though is the energetic cost needed to maintain sensory and regulatory machinery needed for plasticity. As to the direct costs of these, there is a lot of contention. Different taxa have different ways of maintaining these tools for plasticity. It will take a lot more research to parse these costs out across the animal kingdom.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are ecotoxicologists going to the dogs? No...but they should.

A few months ago I read an article about the Miami Heat basketball organization using Covid sniffing dogs to admit fans into the arena and was blown away. They can't actually detect the virus, but they can pick up the chemical differences in the composition of breaths exhaled between healthy and infected individuals (Dorman 2021). I've always heard about dogs being used to detect drugs and track fugitives, but the ability to detect a virus by sniffing a person's breath is just on a whole other level. I started thinking about possible applications and the idea of using dogs to detect pollutants in the environment came across my mind.  While researching the capabilities of these sniffing dogs, I searched for any examples or projects that involved using sniffing dogs as pollutant detectors and I came across an EPA proof of concept from 2003. The idea was to train sniffing dogs to be able to detect various environmental contaminants that range from house molds to illegal pestic...
4 comments
Read more

I got 99 problems but a bee ain't one: how does host condition affect parasite development?

Over the course of the past few weeks I've been fascinated by extreme life cycles and had planned on writing about the development of organisms that possessed some of those life cycles. I stumbled upon a few examples of parasites that had complex multi-host lifecycles which perked my interest and also was something we hadn't dwelled on in class. We've touched briefly on in utero development which I suppose is somewhat like a parasite developing in a host, but parasite development hasn't been covered. Furthermore, is parasite development subject to similar environmental stressors as the ones we've discussed?  In a paper (cited below) by Logan A. et al., the authors want to know if pollen starvation (low food abundance) in hosts can alter parasite abundance in hosts.  The researchers did an experiment involving  Crithidia bombi (gut parasite) in bumble bees. In this experiment, the researchers were curious about how pollen starvation effects parasite abundance in host...
2 comments
Read more

A discussion of compensatory growth and how it could play a role in captive rearing strategies

One aspect of plasticity that interests me is the idea of compensatory growth (CG). CG is when limitation in resources restricts something like a tadpole from growing at an early stage, but then later, a release in that restriction results in an accelerated growth rate above the average in a population. Observationally, this may just look like less fit tadpoles. Bigger is always better, right?   Maybe not. Consider an extreme example, where a large spider has caught two types of prey on its web, a fruit fly, and a housefly. Now suppose the spider can only pick one prey (perhaps they're only loosely caught on the web and there's a short window of opportunity). Which will the large spider most likely go for? It will probably choose the larger housefly.  Similarly, think of two tadpoles. This time they're the same species, but one is larger than the other. A giant ambushing Anax larva also lives in this pond and it's hungry. But it will give away its position when it attac...
2 comments
Read more