Berkeley, California, USA
March 26, 2026
Climate change poses a huge threat to plant species, including staple crops that people across the globe rely on daily. Plants have some innate ability to adapt to changing conditions, but will crops and other key plants be able to survive increasingly large and rapid changes in temperature, moisture levels, and other environmental factors due to climate change?
In a new paper out today in Science, IGI Investigator Moi Expósito-Alonso and colleagues around the world embarked on an ambitious, large-scale experiment: tracking evolution in the commonly studied plant Arabidopsis thaliana for 5 years in over 30 outdoor locations across Europe, the Middle East, and North America, each with a distinct climate. The goal was to investigate how likely and predictable rapid evolution in plant species might be to changing conditions. It took a team of over 70 collaborators to track all of the plant populations and analyze the large amount of data collected.
Alison Yin/AP Images for Center for Howard Hughes Medical Institute 2023
Moi with small Arabidopsis plants
“The plant ecology community is very collaborative and many people jumped in, establishing long-term evolution plots in gardens, botanical institutes, or just someone’s backyard,” says Expósito-Alonso.
Using whole-genome sequencing of over 70,000 surviving plants, Expósito-Alonso and his team uncovered both known and novel adaptive genetic variants in the plants that survived. These genes were largely ones involved in handling environmental stress like high heat, as well as genes that influence the timing of growth and reproduction — crucial parts of the plant lifecycle influenced by temperature, and therefore sensitive to climate change. The team explored the evolutionary dynamics that led some groups to survive while others perished, identifying genomic patterns that predicted survival or demise.
“The evolutionary dynamics are faster in the context of warmer environments, suggesting they exert more evolutionary pressure and populations are trying to adapt to that,” says Expósito-Alonso. “A heat wave, for instance, can kick off intense evolutionary selection and only the most adapted ones survive. But if the pressure becomes too strong, even those populations won’t survive.”
Arabidopsis growing on the coast in Sweden
This work shows that rapid evolution may sometimes be possible while also highlighting its limits, and gives researchers new ideas for modeling risk for different plant populations in the face of climate change, as well as genes that could be edited to help key plant species adapt.
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