Clinal variation as a tool to understand climate change

Abstract

Clines are observable gradients that reflect continuous change in biological traits of species across geographical ranges. Clinal gradients could vary at geographic scales (latitude and altitude). Since clinal variations represent active genomic responses at the population level they (clines) provide an immense power to address questions related to climatic change. With the fast pace of climate change i.e. warming, populations are also likely to exhibit rapid responses; at both the phenotypic and genotypic levels. We seek to understand how clinal variation could be used to anticipate climatic responses using Drosophila, a pervasively used inter-disciplinary model system owing to its molecular repertoire. The genomic information coupled with the phenotypic variation greatly facilitates our understanding of the Drosophilidae response to climate change. We discuss traits associated with clinal variation at the phenotypic level as well as their underlying genetic regulators. Given prevailing climatic conditions and future projections for climate change, clines could emerge as monitoring tools to track the cross-talk between climatic variables and organisms.

Long-term cold selection leads to increased thermal plasticity of male body size and thermal canalization of fecundity inDrosophila melanogaster

“…Drosophila, the ectotherm is particularly well-suited for studies focusing on both thermal plasticity and evolution, because of its (a) amenability to studies manipulating temperature in the laboratory, both within and across generations, and, (b) wide geographic range across latitudes and continents covering thermally diverse regions [15][16][17]. In holometabolous insects like Drosophila, cold developmental temperature leads to slow growth and metamorphosis, which translates into emergence of bigger flies, demonstrating the temperature size rule [5,18,19].…”