3
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      “Bet hedging” against climate change in developing and adult animals: roles for stochastic gene expression, phenotypic plasticity, epigenetic inheritance and adaptation

      review-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Animals from embryos to adults experiencing stress from climate change have numerous mechanisms available for enhancing their long-term survival. In this review we consider these options, and how viable they are in a world increasingly experiencing extreme weather associated with climate change. A deeply understood mechanism involves natural selection, leading to evolution of new adaptations that help cope with extreme and stochastic weather events associated with climate change. While potentially effective at staving off environmental challenges, such adaptations typically occur very slowly and incrementally over evolutionary time. Consequently, adaptation through natural selection is in most instances regarded as too slow to aid survival in rapidly changing environments, especially when considering the stochastic nature of extreme weather events associated with climate change. Alternative mechanisms operating in a much shorter time frame than adaptation involve the rapid creation of alternate phenotypes within a life cycle or a few generations. Stochastic gene expression creates multiple phenotypes from the same genotype even in the absence of environmental cues. In contrast, other mechanisms for phenotype change that are externally driven by environmental clues include well-understood developmental phenotypic plasticity (variation, flexibility), which can enable rapid, within-generation changes. Increasingly appreciated are epigenetic influences during development leading to rapid phenotypic changes that can also immediately be very widespread throughout a population, rather than confined to a few individuals as in the case of favorable gene mutations. Such epigenetically-induced phenotypic plasticity can arise rapidly in response to stressors within a generation or across a few generations and just as rapidly be “sunsetted” when the stressor dissipates, providing some capability to withstand environmental stressors emerging from climate change. Importantly, survival mechanisms resulting from adaptations and developmental phenotypic plasticity are not necessarily mutually exclusive, allowing for classic “bet hedging”. Thus, the appearance of multiple phenotypes within a single population provides for a phenotype potentially optimal for some future environment. This enhances survival during stochastic extreme weather events associated with climate change. Finally, we end with recommendations for future physiological experiments, recommending in particular that experiments investigating phenotypic flexibility adopt more realistic protocols that reflect the stochastic nature of weather.

          Related collections

          Most cited references192

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Stochasticity in gene expression: from theories to phenotypes.

          Genetically identical cells exposed to the same environmental conditions can show significant variation in molecular content and marked differences in phenotypic characteristics. This variability is linked to stochasticity in gene expression, which is generally viewed as having detrimental effects on cellular function with potential implications for disease. However, stochasticity in gene expression can also be advantageous. It can provide the flexibility needed by cells to adapt to fluctuating environments or respond to sudden stresses, and a mechanism by which population heterogeneity can be established during cellular differentiation and development.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Editing DNA Methylation in the Mammalian Genome.

            Mammalian DNA methylation is a critical epigenetic mechanism orchestrating gene expression networks in many biological processes. However, investigation of the functions of specific methylation events remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate that fusion of Tet1 or Dnmt3a with a catalytically inactive Cas9 (dCas9) enables targeted DNA methylation editing. Targeting of the dCas9-Tet1 or -Dnmt3a fusion protein to methylated or unmethylated promoter sequences caused activation or silencing, respectively, of an endogenous reporter. Targeted demethylation of the BDNF promoter IV or the MyoD distal enhancer by dCas9-Tet1 induced BDNF expression in post-mitotic neurons or activated MyoD facilitating reprogramming of fibroblasts into myoblasts, respectively. Targeted de novo methylation of a CTCF loop anchor site by dCas9-Dnmt3a blocked CTCF binding and interfered with DNA looping, causing altered gene expression in the neighboring loop. Finally, we show that these tools can edit DNA methylation in mice, demonstrating their wide utility for functional studies of epigenetic regulation.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Optimizing reproduction in a randomly varying environment.

              Dan Cohen (1966)
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Physiol
                Front Physiol
                Front. Physiol.
                Frontiers in Physiology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-042X
                06 October 2023
                2023
                : 14
                : 1245875
                Affiliations
                [1] 1 Developmental Integrative Biology Group , Department of Biological Sciences , University of North Texas , Denton, TX, United States
                [2] 2 Laboratorio de Ecofisiología Animal , Departamento de Biología , Facultad de Ciencias , Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México , Toluca, Mexico
                Author notes

                Edited by: Rafael Martinez-garcia, Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Mexico

                Reviewed by: Holly Shiels, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

                Gina Galli, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

                *Correspondence: Warren W. Burggren, burggren@ 123456unt.edu
                Article
                1245875
                10.3389/fphys.2023.1245875
                10588650
                37869716
                f8ee614a-df4d-449e-9407-b5f552fed244
                Copyright © 2023 Burggren and Mendez-Sanchez.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 23 June 2023
                : 12 September 2023
                Categories
                Physiology
                Review
                Custom metadata
                Developmental Physiology

                Anatomy & Physiology
                climate change,weather,phenotypic plasticity,development,stochasticity
                Anatomy & Physiology
                climate change, weather, phenotypic plasticity, development, stochasticity

                Comments

                Comment on this article