Final Report Summary - EVOCHANGE (Complex adaptation in photosynthetic microbes evolving in response to global change.)
Interestingly, we found that many of the drastic changes in traits (changes in cell size or pigmentation) that the organisms underwent when they were first exposed to the multidriver environments reversed over a few hundred generations (months). This is important, as it means that short-term studies may overestimate the amount of change in organisms over longer periods of time. My group is currently investigating ways of understanding which traits evolve to change and which traits evolve to revert in new environments. This will be a key part of predicting how microbes act in future environments.
A second project focused on how being able to produce and transmit epigenetic information between generations affects the ability to evolve in the same photosynthetic alga. Epigenetic changes can affect gene expression, and thus the characters of an organism, but do not change the underlying genetic sequence. Previous work by my group, and continued work during my ERC grant used computer simulations to show that this epigenetic information could affect evolution over hundreds or thousands of generations, but there was no test of this in real organisms. During the ERC grant, we evolved microalgae in the laboratory for hundreds of generations and manipulated the extent to which they could use epigenetic changes. We found that being able to produce and transmit epigenetic information allowed populations to adapt more, demonstrating that epigenetic changes affect evolutionary processes even over timescales where genetic mutations can occur.