Plant adaptation research could help find ways to make crops more resilient to climate change

A team at the University of Calgary is making scientific advances in understanding plant adaptation, which could ultimately be used to find ways to make agricultural crops more resilient to heat, drought and climate change.

Dr. Sam Yeaman, PhD, and his team in the Department of Biological Sciences published a new study, “Repeated Global Adaptation across Plant Species,” in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The research, led by Dr. Gabriele Nocchi, PhD, is a first look at whether distantly related plant species – from sunflowers to poplars – use the same genes to adapt to a similar stress.

The answer?

“Yes, and no,” Yeaman, an associate professor in the Faculty of Science, says in an interview. “They do overlap more than random, but they still do a lot of different things. You could say that while each species has its own story, they share many of the same characters.”

The study suggests there are some key genes that are particularly important for how plants respond adaptively to changes in their environment.

It comes a few months after Yeaman’s lab published another study, “The Genetic Architecture of Repeated Local Adaptation to Climate in Distantly Related Plants,” in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

That paper, published with an international team of authors in August, analyzed genomic data from 25 distantly related plant species, including many of the same species studied in this new paper. It found many genes were repeatedly involved in adaptation to similar climate factors.

While both studies examined how plants adapt to their environment, there were differences.

The Nature paper studied how plants adapt to changes over space, from the frigid Yukon boreal to the temperate B.C. rainforests; and, the PNAS paper explores how species adjust to a change in environment over time.

“Taken together, they give us a better understanding of what’s happening,” explains Yeaman.

He says much of the research is pure science right now, but there’s a lot of excitement about it in the agriculture and biotech industries. That’s because it helps in the understanding of how plants use similar genetic mechanisms to adapt to their environment.

Those genes could be important for developing crops that are more resilient to climate-related challenges, which would help to improve food security.

The research also tests important predictions of evolutionary theory, a concept Yeaman explained with a day-to-day example from our homes.

“You can flip your thermostat and turn your furnace on or off to make a big change in temperature, or you can make renovations to improve your home’s overall thermal efficiency, doing lots of small tweaks; from improving insulation to upgrading windows to fixing air leaks.”

Evolution, he says, favours a similar difference in strategy.

“When the whole species is adapting to a new stress like climate change (over time), theory predicts it will tend to involve many small mutations,” explains Yeaman. “But when different populations inhabit hot versus cold environments (over space), the best strategy is to have a small number of big mutations that act like thermostats controlling the difference between populations in hot versus cold conditions.”

Consistent with those theories, his team found that genes driving adaptation over space tend to have larger effects in the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper, while genes driving adaptations over time tend to have smaller effects in the PNAS paper.

“In both cases, we would find the same genes popping up over and over again in species as different as sunflower and poplar.”

The research was funded by an NSERC Discovery Grant and Alberta Innovates, with computational support by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.