Reconstructing evolutionary trajectories of adaptive alleles through space and time in wild carnations

Résumé

The ability of species to adapt to different environmental conditions is a key determinant of their distribution ranges and potential shifts linked to temporal climatic oscillations. Disentangling the genetic basis of such adaptive processes is a cornerstone of evolutionary biology and has become instrumental to better understand, and ultimately predict, the potential of species to respond to climate change.

In this talk, I will focus on reconstructing the evolution of adaptation to the environmental variation that characterizes altitudinal gradients in the central Alps in wild carnations. For these plant species, distribution ranges cover a broad ecological niche that was occupied following the expansion from peripheral refugia after the last glacial maximum.

We find that altitudinal adaptation relies on ancestral variation that originated during the rapid radiation that spurred the current diversity of the genus. Adaptive haplotypes likely generated through recombination of genetic variation shared by introgressing lineages, and survived in glacial refugia before being recruited by natural selection to colonize mountain ranges of the central Alps following the last glacial maximum. This evidence provides insights into evolutionary trajectories of adaptive alleles that underlaid the successful expansion of the species’ ranges in the past, and are predicted to fuel future responses to changing climatic conditions.

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