Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Charlotte Auerbach Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3FL, UK.
Ecol Lett. 2020 May;23(5):780-790. doi: 10.1111/ele.13478. Epub 2020 Feb 17.
Phytoplankton are the unicellular photosynthetic microbes that form the base of aquatic ecosystems, and their responses to global change will impact everything from food web dynamics to global nutrient cycles. Some taxa respond to environmental change by increasing population growth rates in the short-term and are projected to increase in frequency over decades. To gain insight into how these projected 'climate change winners' evolve, we grew populations of microalgae in ameliorated environments for several hundred generations. Most populations evolved to allocate a smaller proportion of carbon to growth while increasing their ability to tolerate and metabolise reactive oxygen species (ROS). This trade-off drives the evolution of traits that underlie the ecological and biogeochemical roles of phytoplankton. This offers evolutionary and a metabolic frameworks for understanding trait evolution in projected 'climate change winners' and suggests that short-term population booms have the potential to be dampened or reversed when environmental amelioration persists.
浮游植物是单细胞光合微生物，它们构成了水生生态系统的基础，它们对全球变化的反应将影响从食物网动态到全球营养循环的一切。一些分类群通过在短期内增加种群增长率来应对环境变化，预计在几十年内会更频繁地出现。为了深入了解这些预计的“气候变化赢家”是如何进化的，我们在改善的环境中培养微藻种群，历经数百代。大多数种群进化到将更少的碳分配给生长，同时提高其耐受和代谢活性氧（ROS）的能力。这种权衡推动了决定浮游植物生态和生物地球化学作用的特征的进化。这为理解预计的“气候变化赢家”中的特征进化提供了进化和代谢框架，并表明当环境改善持续时，短期的种群繁荣有可能减弱或逆转。
