Year-round plants adapt to evolutionary weather changes

Confronted Charles Darwin's view that evolution took place slowly, scientists at the University of California in Irvine (UCI) discovered that short-lived crops can evolve to adapt to climate change in just a few years.

The finding suggests that some plants that grow as quickly as weeds can cope with global warming rather than slow-growing plants such as red or cedar wood, which can lead to changes. about plant life on earth in the future.

Arthur Weis, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said: 'Some species evolve quite quickly to survive with changes in the environment.' The warming of the earth can increase the pace of change and as a result, some species have problems with adaptation. Plants with longer life cycles will have less fertility to evolve

The study was published in a report by the National Academy of Sciences on January 8

(Photo: calflora.net) Professor Weis, research experts Steve Franks and Sheina Sim conducted research on mustard, a weed found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. In the greenhouse, they planted mustard grass with the seeds obtained near the vacant UCI plot in the spring of 1997 - two years earlier of the five-year long-term sunshine with the seeds obtained after the winter term. 2004. These seeds can ' sleep ' but still live for many years and will ' revive ' when there is water and light. They are divided into 3 groups, each receiving a different amount of artificial snow from the time of drought to wet. In most groups, the group of plants after the drought starts earlier regardless of planned irrigation.

An experiment was conducted on mother trees and seedlings to help prove the genetic change and, as expected, hybrids between two generations have a period of intermediate flowering. Researcher Steven Franks said, ' Early winter rains do not work much during the drought, especially in the late winter and spring of dry weather in an unusual way. The pressurized rain spray system has been pre-selected on the plant so that they flower earlier, especially for some year-round plants like mustard grass'. 'During the drought period, the plants bloom early to form seeds before the soil is dry, while the late flowering plants dry up before they can be seeded'.

The technique of planting mother trees and seedlings at the same time helps scientists determine the timing of flowering but not simply respond when climate conditions change or more precisely, evolutionary change . And this method is led by Albert Bennett, professor of evolutionary ecology and biology and head of UCI's Department of Biological Sciences. This method has been carried out on bacteria, but this is the first study to be used on plants. Bennett and his colleagues conducted cooling of the Ecoli sequences in the mother plant so that they could evaluate the bacterial evolutionary adaptation after transplanting them into thousands of high-temperature seedlings.

Currently, Professor Weis, president of Project Baseline, is working hard to collect and preserve seeds from existing plant densities. Hopefully for centuries, plant biologists will be able to ' revive ' the seeds and compare them with the next generation of seeds. At that time, advanced DNA technology could sequence the entire genome of each single plant with the lowest cost. If so, biologists can assess the degree of adaptive evolution of plants and locate the dominant genetic basis of evolution.

Scientists expect global warming to change the flow of air across the Pacific, and weather forecasting models will provide regular and regular and maximum fluctuations of rainfall along the coast, which This is likely to affect plant life.

Professor Weis said, ' If we go out and collect some seeds, then cool them, they will become a reserve available to help scientists carry on the seedlings of the next generation. '. 'As the earth is getting warmer, the explosion of evolution is getting ready. If we act now, then in the future we will have the necessary tools to determine how these species adapt to climate change. "

The research is supported by the National Science Association

Anh Phuong