From devastating floods to severe droughts and rising temperatures, the climate crisis is changing natural habitats around the world. To survive, many plants were forced to adapt quickly. And these adaptations can be passed on to future generations, according to new research published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

"One day I thought [about] how a person's lifestyle and experience can affect their gametes [reproductive cells] by transmitting molecular marks of their life to their children. I immediately thought that even more epigenetic marks should be transmitted by plants, and plants are sesssis organisms [fixed in one place] that are subject to much more environmental stresses than animals during their lifetime," Federico Martinelli, plant geneticist at the University of Florence, tells Euronews.

Plants do not create memories in the same way as humans, but still remember experiences experienced, says the researcher. They store these experiences in sophisticated cellular and molecular signaling networks through a mechanism called "somatic memory". "These mechanisms allow plants to recognize the occurrence of a previous environmental condition and react more readily in the presence of the same consequential condition," martinelli says.

And these learnings can be transmitted to plant descendants through what researchers call "epigenetics." Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes do not alter a DNA sequence, but can change the way an organism reads a DNA sequence. "Epigenetic modifications are inherited... thus contributing to the long-term adaptation of plant species to climate change," the authors write in the paper.

Source: Um só Planeta