Can life keep up with climate change?
Nature finds ingenious solutions through an iterative process of trial and error – that is, through natural selection. Evolutionary geneticists have studied such biological processes for the past century. Today, climate change is forcing plants and animals to adapt to new conditions, but there is still much to learn about their capacity to do so.
Interdisciplinary effort
Inspired by biological evolution, computer scientists have used artificial selection to improve computer programs. Thus, the field of evolutionary computation has emerged, more or less independently of modelling in biology. The focus of the EU-funded RACE project, hosted at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, was to bring together these different disciplines. To start, RACE project researcher Barbora Trubenová had to translate methods commonly used by computer scientists into biological terminology. “There are many equivalents between the two, and a proper translation enables the use of methods developed and widely used in evolutionary computing to analyse questions in evolutionary biology,” she explains. “Conversely, methods from population genetics can be used to inform evolutionary computation.” Following this groundwork, Trubenová and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, created a complex model to better understand how organisms respond to changes in the environment.
Specialisation vs survival
The problem is challenging: Trubenová’s virtual creatures had multiple genes which could contribute to, or detract from, their fitness, and thus influence the organism’s survival in different environmental conditions. The outcome depends on the interaction between population size, the strength of the selection pressure and the frequency of environmental change. “We showed that while frequent change between environmental conditions hinders adaptation, it may, under certain conditions, protect the population from extinction,” notes Trubenová. “This happens when frequent environmental change prevents the population from overspecialisation, resulting in populations of generalists that may survive, though not thrive, in a wide range of conditions.” Trubenová’s research was undertaken with the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme. She says that this allowed her to attend conferences and disseminate her findings. “I appreciated this freedom to be my own boss, design my own project and do what I wanted to do,” she explains.
Evolution for schools
During this time, Trubenová also performed outreach, including starting a competition in evolutionary biology for high school students in her home nation of Slovakia. “Evolution is not taught much in high schools there, so we tried to supplement that teaching,” she says. It’s now running for a fourth year. Trubenová is currently working at ETH in Switzerland, studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance in biofilms. She says that when she began her work on evolutionary computing in biology in 2017, there was little communication between the fields, something that has now changed. “There were no polygenic models of adaptation in a changing environment. We had to set up models ourselves in collaboration with computer scientists,” she adds. “When I started, there were no studies like this, now there are quite a few. It’s become a hot topic.”
Keywords
RACE, evolution, natural, selection, computation, model, genetic, mathematical, collaboration
