Research line: Mechanisms of evolutionary change and adaptation
Mechanisms of evolutionary change and adaptation encompass a broad and interdisciplinary field within evolutionary biology, integrating multiple research areas such as ecological genetics, gene expression regulation in natural environments, ecological epigenetics, environmentally induced developmental modifications, ecophysiology, experimental evolution, and both genetic and non-genetic transgenerational inheritance mechanisms. Through ecological genetics we investigate how genetic variation interacts with environmental factors to drive evolutionary processes in natural populations, often through selection and resulting in adaptive divergence among populations. Further, we study the regulation of gene expression in ecological contexts, revealing how organisms modulate phenotypic traits in response to fluctuating environmental conditions, manifesting phenotypic plasticity. Ecological epigenetics then tries to elucidate how such changes in gene expression may be at least partially heritable, even if independent of alterations in the primary DNA structure, and how this may impact the evolutionary dynamics.
Within this research line we can also make use of experimental evolution to observe evolutionary change over generational timescales under controlled environmental conditions, offering insights into the mechanisms of adaptation. Experimental evolution is also contributing to the study of transgenerational inheritance, encompassing both genetic transmission and non-genetic elements, assessing the extent to which adaptive traits and environmentally induced modifications can be passed from one generation to the next. Collectively, studying mechanisms of evolutionary change requires highly integrative approaches combining fieldwork with experimental approaches, comparative standardized methodologies and the implementation of genomic tools.
