ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld, Australia.
School of Life Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW, Australia.
Glob Chang Biol. 2018 Jan;24(1):13-34. doi: 10.1111/gcb.13903. Epub 2017 Oct 12.
Phenotypic plasticity, both within and across generations, is an important mechanism that organisms use to cope with rapid climate change. While an increasing number of studies show that plasticity across generations (transgenerational plasticity or TGP) may occur, we have limited understanding of key aspects of TGP, such as the environmental conditions that may promote it, its relationship to within-generation plasticity (WGP) and its role in evolutionary potential. In this review, we consider how the detection of TGP in climate change experiments is affected by the predictability of environmental variation, as well as the timing and magnitude of environmental change cues applied. We also discuss the need to design experiments that are able to distinguish TGP from selection and TGP from WGP in multigenerational experiments. We conclude by suggesting future research directions that build on the knowledge to date and admit the limitations that exist, which will depend on the way environmental change is simulated and the type of experimental design used. Such an approach will open up this burgeoning area of research to a wider variety of organisms and allow better predictive capacity of the role of TGP in the response of organisms to future climate change.
表型可塑性，无论是在个体内部还是跨代之间，都是生物体应对快速气候变化的重要机制。虽然越来越多的研究表明跨代可塑性（transgenerational plasticity 或 TGP）可能会发生，但我们对 TGP 的关键方面了解有限，例如可能促进 TGP 的环境条件、它与代内可塑性（within-generation plasticity 或 WGP）的关系以及它在进化潜力中的作用。在这篇综述中，我们考虑了在气候变化实验中检测 TGP 如何受到环境变化可预测性的影响，以及所应用的环境变化线索的时间和幅度。我们还讨论了需要设计能够在多代实验中区分 TGP 与选择以及 TGP 与 WGP 的实验的必要性。最后，我们提出了未来的研究方向，这些研究方向将建立在迄今为止的知识基础上，并承认存在的局限性，这将取决于环境变化的模拟方式和使用的实验设计类型。这种方法将使这一日益兴起的研究领域能够应用于更多种类的生物体，并提高 TGP 在生物体对未来气候变化反应中的作用的预测能力。
