January 22, 2020

12:00pm The Hershey Hall Grand Salon, Room 158, Hershey Hall

Patricia Schulte
Department of Zoology, The University of British Columbia

" Ecological Epigenetics, Adaptive Variation and the Response of Fish to a Changing Environment "

Understanding the capacity of fish to tolerate the environmental fluctuations induced by climate change is critical to the development of effective conservation strategies. Rapid adaptation from standing genetic variation has the potential to buffer populations against environmental change, but the extent of variation among individuals in genes encoding climate-change relevant traits remains poorly understood. In addition, evidence is accumulating that epigenetic mechanisms (e.g., chromatin modifications, DNA methylation) can affect ecologically important traits, even in the absence of genetic variation, and that these mechanisms may also play a key role in responses to a changing environment. Here, I explore the potential role of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms in both short‐ and long‐term adaptation of fish to environmental change. Probing the molecular mechanisms underlying how fish respond to environmental change at levels of biological organization ranging from the genome and the epigenome to the transcriptome to the whole organism reveals the key roles of both plasticity and adaptive evolution in the response to anthropogenic environmental change.

 

Refreshments will be served at 11:40 a.m.

Host: Paul Barber