ID: 613 / 88

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: ASSESSING THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN GENETIC AND NON-GENETIC MECHANISMS CONTRIBUTING TO PHENOTYPIC VARIATION AND ADAPTATION OVER TIME

Abstract: To understand how ecosystems respond to global change, we must understand how biological diversity and ecosystem function are maintained over time. One of the most crucial and pressing pursuits in this direction is to determine what causes communities and populations to be resilient to environmental change. Ecologists have long argued about multiple mechanisms by which local biodiversity might achieve greater temporal stability and thus support the temporal stability of ecosystem properties. Among these mechanisms, heritable differences in phenotype and phenotypic plasticity are important contributors to adaptation. Genetic diversity is assumed to allow populations to adapt to changing environmental fluctuations by offering a greater variety of phenotypes among which the most fit can be selected. However, the ability of an organism to modulate trait expression in response to the environment (i.e., phenotypic plasticity) is also heritable. Such induced responses can be of highly variable duration, from short-term transient modifications operating within the lifetime of individuals (within-generation plasticity) to inherited differences across generations (transgenerational plasticity). The relative effect of genetic vs. non-genetic mechanisms, including their temporal extent and to which extent they are triggered by different environmental drivers, largely remain to be assessed. It is unclear to which extent non-genetic effects are cumulative when environmental conditions are maintained across generations. We also do not know how reversible induced differences are when environmental conditions change. These questions require researchers to assess how the role of genetic diversity and/or diversity in non-genetic inheritance interacts with population stability over time. Another important task is to describe how such questions can be addressed experimentally. This symposium will gather diverse researchers who are working to understand the link between genetic and non-genetic effects on short- and long-term phenotypic variation within species and how genetic and non-genetic effects can be disentangled in natural populations.

Speaker 1: Javier Puy (agreed to attend) Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Estación Biológica de Doñana, CSIC, Sevilla, Spain puy.javi@gmail.com Tentative talk title: Diversity of parental environments contributes to biodiversity and population stability

Speaker 2: Mar Sobral (agreed to attend) Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain sobral.bernal.mar@gmail.com Tentative talk title: Phenotypic, epigenetic, and fitness diversity within plant genotypes

Speaker 3: Francesco de Bello (agreed to attend) Centro de Investigaciones sobre Desertificación, Valencia 46113, Spain fradebel@ext.uv.es Tentative talk title: Trait variation over time in plant populations of different origins: relative effects of genetic and epigenetic origins under different environments

Topics (Up to three): Global Change Ecology

Topic 2: Ecology and Plant Communities

Topic 3: Plant, Animal, and Microbe Interactions

Justification: The proposed symposium aims to synthesize the recent developments across different fields of research, connecting studies on genetic diversity, phenotypic diversity and non-genetic effects such as transgenerational plasticity. As such, we will assess topics like phylogenetics and phylogenomics, trait-based ecology and plant communities, epigenetics and transgenerational plasticity, functional genetics, and global change ecology in combination, with the aim of outlining unexplored areas of research that bridge these fields.