One of the most significant challenges organisms currently face is global warming. If we want to conserve biodiversity, understanding the evolutionary potential of species to adapt to future climate changes is crucial. This study's primary objective is to assess populations' capacity to adapt to heat stress. For this, we ran long-term evolution experiments with the powerful microbial model system budding yeast (Saccharomyces spp). We use eight species with distinct temperature preferences, ranging from 15 to 35°C, isolated from diverse ecological and geographic locations worldwide. We evolved multiple populations of each species until 600 generations under conditions simulating relevant global warming scenarios, including gradual temperature increases up to 40°C.
Now, we need to use comparative genomics to dissect the genetic architecture of thermal adaptation. For this, we are sequencing 256 evolved individual representatives from the different species and populations and their respective non-evolved strains. In this sense, we need the resources to analyze the sequences and identify de novo mutations that can explain the differences observed between ancestral and evolved genotypes. This implies quality checks, cleaning raw data, mapping, and variant calling.
Ultimately, the large genomic diversity and evolutionary time frames covered by this project provide the unique opportunity to study responses to future climate change in real-time, with high replication, and across multiple species.