Poly2Adapt · Quantifying polygenic selection in real-time adaptation to climate change
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-05-01 → 2025-04-30
- EU contribution
- €188,590
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Quantifying polygenic selection in real-time adaptation to climate change
Understanding how species adapt to climate change is one of the most pressing challenges in evolution and conservation biology. As climate shifts increasingly disrupt ecosystems, species that are able to evolve rapidly may be more resilient to such changes. This is particularly relevant for long-lived wild vertebrates, for which evolutionary responses are typically more challenging to study. The Poly2Adapt project, supported by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program, aims to transform our understanding of how adaptation operates at the genomic level in such organisms. Focusing on the iconic King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), a long-lived and iconic seabird of the Southern Ocean, this project explores the genetic basis of reproductive success and adaptation over time. The King penguin is highly suitable for such research due to its well-documented life-history traits, recent environmental pressures, and the availability of long-term ecological monitoring data. By combining genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic data with long-term life-history data, Poly2Adapt seeks to reveal how reproductive fitness and climate-linked adaptation manifest in the genome. The project is producing key genomic resources and analytical frameworks that can be applied to other wildlife species. It also provides evidence relevant to EU biodiversity and climate adaptation policy, particularly in terms of developing evolutionary indicators of resilience for climate-threatened species.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Understanding if and how species are able to rapidly adapt to climate change is a major and challenging problem of modern biology. Can evolution operate quickly enough? Theory suggests that the genetic basis of most phenotypic traits is polygenic, and evolution can be rapid if it harnesses this reservoir of standing variation spread across the genome - Poly2Adapt. Recent theoretical advances suggest that the signature of real-time polygenic selection can be identified using time-series genomic data. Moreover, a recent paradigm-shift, framed in the omnigenic model suggests that all genes which are broadly expressed, or in general all genomic regions broadly available in euchromatin, contribute to the heritability of complex traits. How can we use these theoretical advances in concert? Benefiting from a unique genomic time-series dataset comprising 1,000 samples from 2000 to 2021, the aim of Poly2Adapt is to quantify the polygenic variation relevant to real-time adaptation to climate change in the King penguin, a keystone species occupying one of the most climate change-impacted ecosystems. Coupling genomic time-series analysis with gene expression and chromatin accessibility data, I will rigorously test the theories of the polygenic (O1) and omnigenic (O2) models, using this information to develop metrics of adaptation potential (O3) for the conservation of other at-risk species. This will be the first study to detect the footprints of real-time adaptation proposed by the polygenic and omnigenic models in a wild species. The objectives are directly relevant to the priorities of Horizon Europe, to tackle climate change, in particular Mission 1: Adaptation to Climate Change. I will harness interdisciplinary expertise from the host, secondment and collaborators to deepen my skills in evolutionary theory, bioinformatics, and population and conservation genetics. Together, we are well-positioned to employ powerful new approaches to pursue this timely research.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101068395
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50392706a&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51d1cbc17&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union