Epigenetic‐induced alterations in sex‐ratios in response to climate change: An epigenetic trap?

Abstract

We hypothesize that under the predicted scenario of climate change epigenetically mediated environmental sex determination could become an epigenetic trap. Epigenetically regulated environmental sex determination is a mechanism by which species can modulate their breeding strategies to accommodate environmental change. Growing evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms may play a key role in phenotypic plasticity and in the rapid adaptation of species to environmental change, through the capacity of organisms to maintain a non-genetic plastic memory of the environmental and ecological conditions experienced by their parents. However, inherited epigenetic variation could also be maladaptive, becoming an epigenetic trap. This is because environmental sex determination can alter sex ratios by increasing the survival of one of the sexes at the expense of negative fitness consequences for the other, which could lead not only to the collapse of natural populations, but also have an impact in farmed animal and plant species.

Linking epigenetics and biological conservation: Towards a conservation epigenetics perspective

“…For instance, environmental sex determination (ESD) in some fish and some reptiles mainly relies on the expression of the cyp19a1 gene (which encodes for an aromatase enzyme involved in ovarian differentiation) and which expression is controlled by the environmentally driven methylation status of its promoter (Hunt et al, 2013; but see Ge et al, 2018). As a result, some authors argue that given the ongoing global warming, such epigenetically mediated ESD could become an epigenetic trap by altering sex ratio in natural populations (Consuegra & Rodríguez López, 2016;but see Piferrer, 2016).…”

Environmental conditions and agronomic practices induce consistent global changes in DNA methylation patterns in grapevine (Vitis viniferacv Shiraz)

“…However, Discriminant Analysis of Principal Components did not detect any sample clustering associated to their origin (Figure S4B) indicating that genetic diversity is not structured in a geographic manner. Although both genetic and epigenetic somatic variation can be random (Vogt, 2015), different growing conditions will differentially affect the DNA methylation profiles of otherwise genetically identical individuals (Consuegra and Rodríguez López, 2016) as previously shown on clonally propagated Populus alba (Guarino et al, 2015). It is, therefore, not surprising to find that epigenetic profiling was a better predictor of sample origin than genetic profiling alone both using MSAP data (Table 2, Figure S1) or msGBS data (Figure 5-7 and Figure S4).…”

A Concise Review on Multi-Omics Data Integration for Terroir Analysis in Vitis vinifera

“…The idea that the environment could modify the epigenetic status, and these modifications passed to the offspring (Tricker et al, 2013) or maintained as epigenetic memory on long lived organisms (Latzel et al, 2016), has attracted attention from scientists studying mechanisms involved in adaptation to local environments (Consuegra and Rodríguez López, 2016) and how these could be used to enhance crop performance (Rodríguez López and Wilkinson, 2015). There are many reported examples of how the environment affects the epigenome in natural environments and how epigenetic variations in plant populations could help to overcome the lack of genetic diversity (Fonseca Lira-Medeiros et al, 2010; Verhoeven et al, 2010).…”