The role of GENetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity in adaptations to changing Environments: a genomic analySIS of a biological invasion

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

GENESIS

URL

http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/projet-anr/?tx_lwmsuivibilan_pi2%5BCODE%5D=ANR-13-ADAP-0005

Start date

11/15/2013

End date

11/14/2017

Budget

431,144 EUR

Fundings

Organisations

Abstract

GENESIS has been designed to answer both applied and fundamental research questions about biological adaptation to global and local environmental changes. Maintaining stable and functioning ecosystems under the current global changes is probably the biggest future challenge for conservation management and failing to address these issues is predicted to entail substantial economic repercussions. One of the key aspects of designing efficient conservation strategies is to understand how population structure affects the potential of natural populations to adapt to changing environmental conditions. GENESIS proposes to address a central question in Conservation Biology regarding «the role of genetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity in adapting to changing environmental conditions?» Genesis uses the framework of biological invasion to answer these questions. This is a particularly pertinent framework as the challenge for an invasive species is to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in the selective regime imposed by the colonised ecosystem. Also, a series of stochastic sampling events associated with the colonisation process is predicted to result in strong genetic drift in invasive populations, providing the opportunity for rapid evolutionary change through both selection and drift, and the majority of studies report marked phenotypic change in invasive populations. Providing empirical support for these debates has hitherto been difficult since it requires investigating the relationship between neutral and selected loci at a genomic level and the role of phenotypic plasticity in maintaining the fitness under novel and often contrasting environmental conditions. Genomic approaches in combination with studies of ecologically significant traits provide the opportunity to address such issues. Next-generation sequencing techniques now make feasible the comprehensive scanning of the genome of non-model organisms, thus overcoming the limitations of previous studies which had to rely on a small number of putatively neutral loci. Recent advances in genetic data analysis have provided the tools so that evolutionary processes in wild populations can be inferred from molecular data. Molecular based pedigrees can be used for quantitative genetic analysis and the implementation of high resolution genomic data will increase the power of such approaches significantly. The resulting information on heritability of ecologically significant life history traits or behaviours is crucial in accurately predicting responses to selection and is a key element of GENESIS. This will be achieved by an integrated approach using state-of-the-art genomic approach in combination with an experimental investigation of ecologically significant traits, trophic niche and reproductive behaviour. The invasion framework used in GENESIS is Pseudorasbora parva, a small fish native to Asia. It is an ideal model to address the research gaps outlined above as 1) previous studies have provided information on colonisation history, phenotypic and genetic diversity of invasive population; a prerequisite for a powerful study design; 2) P. parva is the most notorious invasive fish in Europe with devastating impact on native fish fauna through competition and disease introduction and hence research on this species has a high relevance to society; 3) an extensive tissue collection from 22 native/25 invasive populations for genetic and morphological analysis is readily available. All fish have been marked individually to be able to link morphological, life history traits, trophic level using stable isotope analysis and genetic data; 4) it is an ideal model species to use under laboratory conditions with short generation times, small body sizes and high reproductive effort. GENESIS will therefore significantly increase our understanding of factors that promote establishment success of invasive species and the response of small fragmented populations to climate change.