Does phenotypic plasticity help or hinder rapid adaptation?

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a single genotype to make different phenotypes inresponse to environmental variation. If all genotypes in a population respond to anenvironmental change in the same way plasticity can diminish the heritable phenotypicvariation that selection acts on and slow down adaptation. In contrast, if all genotypesrespond in very different ways, plasticity may speed up rapid adaptation. Whether or notplasticity helps or hinders adaptation therefore depends on the time that selection has had toshape the plastic responses of a population to the stressor it is facing. In this context, theeffect that plasticity has on rapid adaptation could be quite different for populations adaptingto aspects of climate change that have always been part of a population's evolutionaryhistory, compared with adaptation to 'novel' anthropogenic environments such as pollutants.Clonal organisms allow us to test this hypothesis because we can expose the same genomesto different environments and compare the effect that they have on individuals, populationsand communities.The aim of this project is to test the hypothesis that plastic responses to climate-relatedstressors slows down adaptation whereas plastic responses to 'novel' environments speeds itup. The relevance of these findings will be determined by comparing rates of adaptation inreplicated populations exposed to combinations of stressors in the laboratory. Although thereis some laboratory evidence that novel environments expose cryptic genetic variation toselection, we still have little understanding of how relevant this is in natural populations,where phenotypes depend on adaptive and non-adaptive plastic responses to manyenvironmental heterogeneities. Understanding these interactions is critical for predicting howpopulations respond to environmental change. This studentship applies diverse approaches,including field and laboratory skills, microscopy, image analysis, and high-level statisticalanalysis to investigate the mechanisms underpinning rapid adaptation.