Western Spadefoot toad has a great capacity to adjust its behaviour, morphology and physiology to environmental changes. Its genome sequencing will help to understand how environmental variations can induce changes at the gene expression level.
This work was led by the Doñana Biological Station – CSIC with the collaboration of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS)

The study, led by the Doñana Biological Station – CSIC, has been carried out with amphibian larvae. Results suggest that maintaining the machinery necessary to respond to environmental changes (phenotypic plasticity) is linked to oxidative stress.
Higher levels of oxidative stress may translate into deteriorated body condition, reduced fertility, and shorter lifespan, which could explain why the response of organisms to global change is limited.

A new research from the Doñana Biological Station has compared the transcriptome-wide responses of two species of spadefoot toads with differing capacity for developmental acceleration of their larvae in the face of a shared environmental risk: pond drying. By comparing gene expression profiles over time and performing cross-species network analyses, the research team identified orthologues and functional gene pathways whose environmental sensitivity in expression have diverged between species.