Geneticists learn more about how plant communities adapt to climate change

A century ago, scientists first noticed the influence of the environment on the evolution of differences in plant population adaptation

That's the view of Penn State molecular geneticist Jill Hamilton, who leads a nationwide study of climate adaptation and hybridization called PopUp poplars

Hamilton, director of the Schatz Center for Molecular Genetics of Trees in the School of Agricultural Sciences, explained that the purpose of the study was to study the changes in adaptation between Populus trichocarpa and Populus balsamifera between natural hybridization zones

Hamilton explained that the study will explore the important role of hybridization in climate adaptation, with the aim of predicting response to changing conditions by understanding how genomic ancestry, genomic variation and environmental variation interact to produce traits important for the fitness of forest trees.

"The genetic basis of local adaptation has been studied in smaller, reciprocally transplanted experiments, but now we are combining whole-genome sequence data with a network of large-scale public garden experiments in model systems such as perennial switchgrass and poplar paired," she added, one of the common poplar garden experiments is at Penn State's Botanical Garden

Hamilton recently published an article on advances in plant adaptation research in the journal Current Perspectives in Plant Biology, citing historical context

She writes: "One hundred years after the Swedish evolutionary botanist Gote Turesson first clearly described how local adaptive changes within species are distributed, today scientists are understanding the mechanisms of adaptation from native populations to continental scales.

Hamilton, who is the Iberson Research Chair in Afforestation in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, noted that Dulson's work was in stark contrast to most researchers at the time, who believed that differences within species reflected acquired traits

Hamilton said: "His work on adaptation led him to coin the term 'ecotype' in 1922, which describes the genetically distinct geographic diversity of a species that is genetically adapted to a particular environmental conditions

To carry out the study, researchers led by Hamilton, who was then at North Dakota State University, collected samples of poplar cuttings in the northwestern United States and southern Canada during the winter of 2020

"At Virginia Tech, their greenhouses are full of poplar saplings," she said

At Penn State, Hamilton intends to involve graduate and undergraduate students in the PopUp project, which uses genetic and environmental variation to predict tree health in complex environments