ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
How is epigenetics predicted to contribute to climate change adaptation? What evidence do we need?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Recent Techniques in Determining the Effects of Climate Change on Depressive Patients: A Systematic Review.Journal of environmental and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Two Decades of DNA Methylation Shifts Reveal Epigenomic Responses to Environmental Change in Wild Salmo salar From Its Southernmost Populations.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Increased adaptive potential in novel environments can be predicted from genetic variance in development time expressed in native environments.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Transgenerational effects of heat shock on gene regulation and fitness-related traits in natural Drosophila populations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Epigenetics in forest trees- key driver to phenotypic plasticity and adaptation under stress.Functional & integrative genomics · 2025Review
- Complementary genetic and epigenetic changes facilitate rapid adaptation to multiple global change stressors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- FAIRification of the DMRichR pipeline: advancing epigenetic research on environmental and evolutionary model organisms.Bioinformatics advances · 2025Article
- Molecular responses of chicken embryos to maternal heat stress through DNA methylation and gene expression: a pilot study.Environmental epigenetics · 2025Article
- Plant conservation in the age of genome editing: opportunities and challenges.Genome biology · 2024Review
- Integrating evolutionary genomics of forest trees to inform future tree breeding amid rapid climate change.Plant communications · 2024Review
- Plant pangenomes for crop improvement, biodiversity and evolution.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2024Review
- The evolutionary consequences of interactions between the epigenome, the genome and the environment.Evolutionary applications · 2024Review
- Review
- Intergenerational plasticity aligns with temperature-dependent selection on offspring metabolic rates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Genome-wide methylome stability and parental effects in the worldwide distributed Lombardy poplar.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Plasticity and associated epigenetic mechanisms play a role in thermal evolution during range expansion.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- To live or let die? Epigenetic adaptations to climate change-a review.Environmental epigenetics · 2024Review
- Pre-fertilization gamete thermal environment influences reproductive success, unmasking opposing sex-specific responses in Atlantic salmon (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Genome-wide DNA methylation patterns in bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) populations from spatial-environmental range extremes.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- From Environmental Epigenetics to the Inheritance of Acquired Traits: A Historian and Molecular Perspective on an Unnecessary Lamarckian Explanation.Biomolecules · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Transgenerational effects that are interpreted in terms of epigenetics have become an important research focus at a time when rapid environmental changes are occurring. These effects are usually interpreted as enhancing fitness extremely rapidly, without depending on the slower process of natural selection changing DNA-encoded (fixed) genetic variants in populations. Supporting evidence comes from a variety of sources, including environmental associations with epialleles, cross-generation responses of clonal material exposed to different environmental conditions, and altered patterns of methylation or frequency changes in epialleles across time. Transgenerational environmental effects have been postulated to be larger than those associated with DNA-encoded genetic changes, based on (for instance) stronger associations between epialleles and environmental conditions. Yet environmental associations for fixed genetic differences may always be weak under polygenic models where multiple combinations of alleles can lead to the same evolutionary outcome. The ultimate currency of adaptation is fitness, and few transgenerational studies have robustly determined fitness effects, particularly when compared to fixed genetic variants. Not all transgenerational modifications triggered by climate change will increase fitness: stressful conditions often trigger negative fitness effects across generations that can eliminate benefits. Epigenetic responses and other transgenerational effects will undoubtedly play a role in climate change adaptation, but further, well-designed, studies are required to test their importance relative to DNA-encoded changes. This article is part of the theme issue 'How does epigenetics influence the course of evolution?'
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