Non-genetic inheritance and rapid evolution

Biosciences Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr Stewart Plaistow, University of Liverpool

Host: Dr Luisa Orsini

Understanding how populations adapt to rapid and sustained anthropogenic change is imperative for predicting limits to population persistence, and reducing species extinction rates. Rapid adaptation might arise through selection operating on standing genetic variation that quantitative genetics has shown to be ubiquitous in natural populations. Alternatively, environment-induced plasticity and non-genetic inheritance (NGI) may facilitate and speed up adaptive evolution. In this talk I will explain how plasticity and NGI might generate rapid evolutionary responses before giving an overview of the work being conducted in my lab designed to test this hypothesis. This will include studies on the mechanisms proposed to underpin NGI through to studies investigating the phenotypic and higher level consequences of plasticity and NGI.