Abstract
Forest tree species are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As sessile organisms with long generation times, their adaptation to a local changing environment may rely on epigenetic modifications when allele frequencies are not able to shift fast enough. However, the current lack of knowledge on this field is remarkable, due to many challenges that researchers face when studying this issue. Huge genome sizes, absence of reference genomes and annotation, and having to analyze huge amounts of data are among these difficulties, which limit the current ability to understand how climate change drives tree species epigenetic modifications. In spite of this challenging framework, some insights on the relationships among climate change-induced stress and epigenomics are coming. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies and an increasing number of studies dealing with this topic must boost our knowledge on tree adaptive capacity to changing environmental conditions. Here, we discuss challenges and perspectives in the epigenetics of climate change-induced forests decline, aiming to provide a general overview of the state of the art.
Highlights
Isabel García-García1*†, Belén Méndez-Cea1*†, David Martín-Gálvez2, José Ignacio Seco3, Francisco Javier Gallego1 and Juan Carlos Linares3
As drought-induced tree mortality has far-reaching consequences that affect a wide-range of fields, from environmental conservation to climate change mitigation efforts, and it is expected to be more frequent under a climatechange scenario, we need to improve our knowledge about the degree to which epigenetic mechanisms are linked to mortality predictions (e. g., Sow et al, 2018; Amaral et al, 2020; GonzálezBenito et al, 2020)
It is expected that the growth rates of forest tree species become on average slow, while the upcoming climate change trends become faster than the rate of allele frequencies shift of forest trees
Summary
Forest trees are sessile organisms which must cope with environment variations since they are not able to migrate to ensure their survival. Epigenetic modifications could be a rapid way to achieve short-term adaptations, since epigenetic marks bring new phenotypes which might affect fitness and, the underlying evolutionary processes It could be key for forest trees survival, as they are sessile long-lived organism with long generation times, so the possible beneficial effects of natural selection on them are limited and slow and will soon be surpassed by the effects of climate change
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