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Hot stuff. For the first time, wild mammals have been seen responding to higher temperatures by altering chemical structures on their DNA. These epigenetic changes may adjust the activity of specific genes, and some are passed on to offspring.
“Global temperatures are rising. It is crucial to understand how wild species are able to cope,” says Alexandra Weyrich of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany.
So far, experiments have largely focused on organisms that have been bred in artificial lab conditions to become very genetically similar. To see if this can happen in more genetically diverse animals, Weyrich’s team studied guinea pigs sourced from South America. They allowed five males to mate with females in an enclosure at a normal ambient temperature of below 5 °C, and then again with other females after spending two months at 30 °C.
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This is a higher temperature difference than they might experience with more gradual climate change, but after two months at this higher temperature, Weyrich’s team found signs of significantly altered methylation in at least 10 genes that seem to be linked to regulating body temperature. “That these genes were differentially methylated before and after heat is stunning,” says Weyrich.
“This suggests global changes in the environment like climate change will affect all species through environmental epigenetics,” says Michael Skinner at Washington State University in Pullman.
Read full, original post: Guinea pigs beat climate change by tweaking their own DNA
