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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Environmentally Induced Heritable Changes in Flax

Environmentally Induced Heritable Changes in Flax

Published on: January 26, 2011

Transgenerational plasticity and climate change experiments: Where do we go from here?

Jennifer M Donelson^1,2, Santiago Salinas³, Philip L Munday¹

¹ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld, Australia.

Global Change Biology

|October 13, 2017

Summary

Phenotypic plasticity across generations (transgenerational plasticity or TGP) helps organisms adapt to climate change. More research is needed to understand TGP

Keywords:

acclimation adaptation environmental predictability maternal effects non-genetic inheritance paternal effects phenotypic plasticity selection within-generation plasticity

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Climate change adaptation
Phenotypic plasticity

Background:

Phenotypic plasticity is crucial for organisms adapting to environmental changes.
Transgenerational plasticity (TGP) and within-generation plasticity (WGP) are key mechanisms.
Understanding TGP's role in climate change adaptation is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

To review factors influencing the detection of TGP in climate change studies.
To explore the relationship between TGP and WGP.
To identify future research directions for TGP.

Main Methods:

Review of existing literature on TGP in climate change experiments.
Analysis of experimental design factors affecting TGP detection.
Discussion of methods to distinguish TGP from selection and WGP.

Main Results:

TGP detection is influenced by environmental variation predictability, timing, and magnitude.
Distinguishing TGP from selection and WGP requires careful experimental design.
Current understanding of TGP is limited by experimental approaches.

Conclusions:

Future research should focus on improved experimental designs to simulate environmental change.
A wider range of organisms should be studied to assess TGP.
Enhanced understanding of TGP will improve predictions of organismal responses to climate change.