The spoonweeds are a species found in the Cairngorms National Park. Credit: Marcus Koch.
Plants of the spoonweed group have adapted to a changing climate over the last two million years, as cold relics in an increasingly warming world. A team of evolutionary biologists and botanists studied what factors favor adaptation to extreme climates. Plants may be able to cope with climate change in the future thanks to the evolutionary history of the Brassicaceae family.
Prof Koch's "biodiversity and plant systematics" working group conducts research at the Centre for Organismal Studies. In many cases, the evolutionary past of plants is very important in determining the future ability of plants to evolve into new forms and types. More than ten million years ago, the Brassicaceae family separated from its Mediterranean relatives. 2.5 million years ago, the spoonweeds conquered the cold and arctic habitats, and their descendants specialized in response to the stress of the Ice Age.
The researchers studied cultivated species from both groups to determine how they adapted to cold and warm weather over the last two million years. The plants developed a high tolerance to cold during their early evolution because of their adaptation to the stress of salt and dry weather. The cold specialists of the Alpine regions and the dry specialists of the Mediterranean appeared to have the same response to cold stress.
The newly emerged plants adapted to cold often came into contact with one another in the cold regions. Because spoonweeds have no genetic barriers to contact between species, populations with multiple sets of chromosomes developed that were continually reduced in their size. Marcus Koch says that the species were able to occupy cold ecological niches.
The European spoonweed population has shrunk since the last Ice Age, as the genes of the cold specialists from the Arctic expanded. Global warming is threatening the survival of spoonweed species in Europe. Only the spoonweed of the Danes, with its abundant sets of chromosomes, is unaffected. It is the only species of spoonweed that can be found in salt and sand. Prof. Koch says that it resembles its Mediterranean cousins. The spoonweeds are a promising model system to study adaptation to cold and salt stress.
The research was published.
Eva M Wolf and her co-authors wrote about the evolutionary footprints of a cold relic in a rapidly warming world. There is a DOI: 10.7554/eLife.71572.
The journal has information on eLife.
The spoonweed plants are cold specialists from the Ice Age.
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