Adapting to extreme environments: hybridisation and the evolution of contemporary heavy metal tolerance

气候变化、城市化和自然资源开发日益改变着环境，给动植物带来了巨大的挑战。要让物种适应如此快的变化，他们要么需要利用新的遗传变异，而新的遗传变异可能出现得非常慢，要么需要利用现有的现有变异，这可能非常快。另一种可能性是，适应性等位基因将通过与密切相关的物种杂交而获得，通过重复使用现有的适应性变异来促进快速适应。相同适应特征的重复进化为研究快速适应的遗传基础提供了独特的机会，最终向我们提供了关于对不断变化的气候的进化反应可能在多大程度上是可预测的。

Climate change, urbanisation and exploitation of natural resources increasingly alter the environment, posingsignificant challenges for plants and animals. For species to adapt to such fast paced change, they will either need todraw on new genetic variation, which is likely to emerge very slowly, or on existing standing variation, which ispotentially very fast. Another possibility is that adaptive alleles will be acquired via hybridisation with closely relatedspecies, facilitating rapid adaptation through the re-use of existing adaptive variation. Repeated evolution of the sameadaptive trait offers unique opportunities to investigate genetic underpinning of rapid adaptation, ultimately informingus about the extent to which evolutionary responses to a changing climate might be predictable.