Remembering change: environmental memory and the evolution of responsiveness

Organisms respond to their environment through their genetic makeup and the conditions they experience at a given moment, but also through biological states shaped by earlier environments, developmental history and, in some cases, previous generations. These effects influence gene regulation, physiology and phenotype over very different timescales, from transient responses to persistent changes. Understanding this temporal dimension of environmental responsiveness is important to connect molecular mechanisms of plasticity with adaptation and evolution.
Also, environmental responsiveness is interlinked with genetic change. Chromatin states are downstream of environmental triggers and upstream of mutational biases, and the molecular systems that generate, maintain and reset environmentally induced states are themselves subject to evolution.
In this seminar, I will draw on studies in stickleback, brown trout and zebrafish to explore how environmental information is established, retained and overwritten across molecular, cellular, organismal and generational timescales, with the ultimate goal to understand how these mechanisms play into evolutionary processes.

Online access* • LINK
*To access the meeting in the app without using the link, use the meeting ID 392 544 435 673 809 and acess code YA2Dp6s2