Climate change is shaping animal movements at a global scale, affecting species distribution, phenology, and invasion status. Dispersal is the movement from the native habitat to another - either temporarily or for reproduction - and a highly relevant life history trait that will determine fitness prospects, population dynamics and species distributions. Although not all individuals are equally likely to disperse, the causes of the variation in dispersal propensity remain poorly understood. Epigenetic mechanisms – changes in gene expression that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence – enable rapid and plastic responses to environmental changes, and individual genomes may differ in their capacity to respond epigenetically – i.e. epigenetic potential. A high capacity for epigenetically-induced variation in these responses may be a requirement for species to successfully settle in novel environments, and this project predicts that individuals with higher dispersal propensity will show greater epigenetic potential. Using a 40-year dataset from a wild bird population and combining analysis of historical samples, field experiments and cutting-edge epigenetic techniques, GENESPERSIVE addresses this question at broad spatial and temporal scales, including long-term individual data and samples from multiple Eurasian populations to track past colonization and current expansion events. Among other project outcomes, we have developed a bioinformatics pipeline to quantify epigenetic potential from raw genetic sequences, which is publicly available. Our results suggest that, within a population, individuals showing higher dispersal also show higher epigenetic potential. Furtehrmore, we also found higher epigenetic potential in individuals living in that population during the colonization phase, when compared to those from later generations. GENESPERSIVE provides mechanistic insights of dispersal behavior, a key step towards predicting species responses in the face of anthropic changes.
