What is it about?
Many organisms, including plants, fungi and insects, are unable to control their internal temperature. Therefore, they are at the mercy of environmental temperature, which can fluctuate considerably between seasons and during day-night cycles. Changes in environmental temperature can thus influence a range of cellular processes and their dynamics, including sexual reproduction, in such organisms. At the core of sexual reproduction is meiosis, which can generate genetic diversity by recombining parental alleles and reshuffling parental chromosomes when producing gametes. Accordingly, environmental temperature can thus potentially affect the extent of genetic diversity in the progeny and be a major driver in the evolutionary adaptation of the meiotic machinery.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Effects of temperature on cellular processes have gained renewed interest in the last decade due to climate change and its potential detrimental impact on agriculture and on the genetic diversity of natural populations.
Perspectives
There is still a lot to learn about how the reproductive mechanisms of organisms adapt and evolve in the face of environmental changes and stresses.
Dr Alexander Lorenz
University of Aberdeen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Intragenic meiotic recombination in Schizosaccharomyces pombe is sensitive to environmental temperature changes, Chromosome Research, April 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10577-020-09632-3.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
