ArticleEnvironmental epigenetics2016
The role of non-genetic inheritance in evolutionary rescue: epigenetic buffering, heritable bet hedging and epigenetic traps.
Article in Environmental epigenetics, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Dietary restriction increases variability in longevity.Biology letters · 2017Pooled it
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- Environmental Variability Shapes Life-History Trade-Offs Within and Between Populations of a Long-Lived Seabird.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Epimutations: raw material for evolution?The EMBO journal · 2026Review
- Epigenetics in Captivity: Restoring Wild Phenotypes in Captive-Reared Salmonids.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Reversibility of sex changes in the plant kingdom: more important than we thought?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Multigenerational temperature effects on paternal epigenetic inheritance in European sea bass.Epigenetics & chromatin · 2025Article
- The role of environmental stress in promoting mutators through evolutionary rescue: quantitative predictions.Genetics · 2025Article
- Transgenerational phenotypic plasticity of the two-spotted spider mite (Tetranychus urticae Koch) in response to abamectin.Experimental & applied acarology · 2025Article
- Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance increases trait variation but is not adaptive.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- iPSCs and iPSC-derived cells as a model of human genetic and epigenetic variation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Assessing Rapid Adaptation Through Epigenetic Inheritance: A New Experimental Approach.Plant, cell & environment · 2025Article
- Adaptive Significance of Non-coding RNAs: Insights from Cancer Biology.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Review
- Unlocking Fungal Potential: The CRISPR-Cas System as a Strategy for Secondary Metabolite Discovery.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Genomic and Epigenomic Influences on Resilience across Scales: Lessons from the Responses of Fish to Environmental Stressors.Integrative and comparative biology · 2024Review
- Exploring Multifunctional Markers of Biological Age in Farmed Gilthead Sea Bream (International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Does climate change increase the risk of marine toxins? Insights from changing seawater conditions.Archives of toxicology · 2024Review
- Microbiome and epigenetic variation in wild fish with low genetic diversity.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Is the speed of adjusting to environmental change condition dependent? An experiment with house mice (Current zoology · 2024Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Rapid environmental change is predicted to compromise population survival, and the resulting strong selective pressure can erode genetic variation, making evolutionary rescue unlikely. Non-genetic inheritance may provide a solution to this problem and help explain the current lack of fit between purely genetic evolutionary models and empirical data. We hypothesize that epigenetic modifications can facilitate evolutionary rescue through 'epigenetic buffering'. By facilitating the inheritance of novel phenotypic variants that are generated by environmental change-a strategy we call 'heritable bet hedging'-epigenetic modifications could maintain and increase the evolutionary potential of a population. This process may facilitate genetic adaptation by preserving existing genetic variation, releasing cryptic genetic variation and/or facilitating mutations in functional loci. Although we show that examples of non-genetic inheritance are often maladaptive in the short term, accounting for phenotypic variance and non-adaptive plasticity may reveal important evolutionary implications over longer time scales. We also discuss the possibility that maladaptive epigenetic responses may be due to 'epigenetic traps', whereby evolutionarily novel factors (e.g. endocrine disruptors) hack into the existing epigenetic machinery. We stress that more ecologically relevant work on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is required. Researchers conducting studies on transgenerational environmental effects should report measures of phenotypic variance, so that the possibility of both bet hedging and heritable bet hedging can be assessed. Future empirical and theoretical work is required to assess the relative importance of genetic and epigenetic variation, and their interaction, for evolutionary rescue.
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