2020-11-18
The Research Group of Du Fang, professor of the School of Ecology and Nature Conservation of BFU, recently published a review paper entitled “ New Approaches for Ecological Adaptation Study: From Population Genetics to Landscape Genomics ” in SCIENTIA SINICA Vitae, a well-known journal in the field of life sciences. By integrating the current research hotspots of population genetics and landscape genomics in the field of plant adaptability, this paper summarizes the cutting-edge theories and methods of ecological adaptation, makes key analysis of the role that population genetics and landscape genomics play in analyzing the molecular mechanism of plant ecological adaptation.
Ecological adaptation is one of the most important responses of species to the changing environment. At present, there are some defects in using single method to solve the problems related to ecological adaptation. This study proposed that the genetic diversity, population structure and gene flow within and between populations of species shall be studied by population genetics in order to analyze the evolutionary historical patterns of species. Next, this study suggests that the newly developed Risk of Non-adaptedness (RONA) can be used to assess species’ response to the current environment and further predict their adaptability to the future environment, estimate their adaptive potential, and reveal the mechanism of species adaptation. Based on this, the technical process of identifying ecological adaptation methods such as genetic differentiation specific loci detection, generalized linear mixed model, multivariate statistical analysis and nonlinear model was established, and their advantages and disadvantages were compared. At last, the paper, summarizing the latest case studies of tree local adaptation at home and abroad, puts forward some suggestions for the future development of ecological adaptation research. This study provides a great help for understanding the ecological adaptation of species to the environment and provides a new research idea for the study of ecological adaptation of species.
The corresponding author of this paper is Prof. Du Fang of School of Ecology and Nature Conservation. The first author is Wang Tianrui, a postgraduate student. This work was funded by “Research and demonstration on the regression technology of critically endangered wild plants with extremely small population” (2016YFC0503106) of National Key R&D Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41671039, 31901075).
Link to the prepublication of the paper:
https://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SSV/doi/10.1360/SSV-2020-0265?slug="abstract
