Meeting Abstract
Temperature plays a large and crucial role in the distribution of species, affecting physiological processes, biophysical structures, metabolic activities and growth rates. Climate change models suggest temperature shifts will occur, altering regimes to which organisms have locally adapted. When relocation or behavior modification alone cannot mediate thermal stress, organisms may rely on epigenetically regulated physiological mechanisms. One physiological response activated by thermal stress is the production heat shock proteins (hsps); which protect cells by stabilizing and refolding stressed proteins or targeting them for degradation. Fruit flies in the genus Drosophila are distributed globally, occurring across a wide range of thermal conditions allowing for evaluation of the effects of evolutionary history on phenotypic plasticity. Thermally stable conditions in which variation between daily and annual high and low temperatures is relatively low may present relaxed selection on maintaining mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity, while populations adapted to variable thermal regimes, such as those in habitats that experience seasonality and strong shifts in minimum and maximum annual temperature may have an evolutionary advantage in the face of increasing variability due to climate change. To investigate the relationships between evolutionary potential and climate change, we evaluated minimum and maximum thermal limits in flies collected from populations across elevational gradients in California and Arizona. Following testing of thermal limits expression of genes associated with heat shock pathways were assessed using qPCR
