Meeting Abstract
Eukaryotes sustain the energy necessary to maintain cellular function through the coordinated actions of genes found in two different genomes: the nuclear and mitochondrial (mt) genomes. It follows that energetically expensive physiological processes such as thermoregulation depend on preserving the precise interactions between nuclear- and mt-encoded gene products. Mitonuclear coevolution is therefore an enduring feature of eukaryotes and is especially important for ecophysiology. Combining molecular approaches to characterize mitonuclear coevolution with physiological studies that characterize the role of mitochondria in environmental adaptation is intriguing (i.e., “mitonuclear ecophysiology”). Here, I present data from three systems that attempt to take such an approach: 1) characterizing mt physiology of cold-adapted aquatic insect larvae during thermal acclimation, 2) assessing mt function in an angiosperm with atypical mt mutation rates and genome sizes, and 3) looking for signatures of mitonuclear coevolution in tissue-specific paralogs with different energetic requirements in both vertebrate and invertebrate systems. It is hoped that new tools in genomics, modeling, and biochemistry will facilitate more refined studies along these lines. Extending such thinking to plastids and other endosymbionts is another obvious goal, as well as integrating these ideas with the role of cytonuclear interactions in classic evolutionary ecology concepts such as speciation and sex.
