Restoring ancestral phenotypes is a general pattern in gene expression evolution during adaptation to new...

Plasticity and evolution are two processes allowing populations to respond to environmental changes, but how both are related and impact each other remains controversial. We studied plastic and evolutionary responses in gene expression of Tribolium castaneum after exposure of the beetles to new environments that differed from ancestral conditions in temperature, humidity or both. Using experimental evolution with 10 replicated lines per condition, we were able to demonstrate adaptation after 20 generations. We measured whole-transcriptome gene expression with RNA-sequencing to infer evolutionary and plastic changes. We found more evidence for changes in mean expression (shift in the intercept of reaction norms) in adapted lines than for changes in plasticity (shifts in slopes). Plasticity was mainly preserved in selected lines and was responsible for a large part of the phenotypic divergence in expression between ancestral and new conditions. However, we found that genes with the largest evolutionary changes in expression also evolved reduced plasticity and often showed expression levels closer to the ancestral stage. Results obtained in the three different conditions were similar, suggesting that restoration of ancestral expression levels during adaptation is a general evolutionary pattern. With a larger sample in the most stressful condition, we were able to detect a positive correlation between the proportion of genes with reversion of the ancestral plastic response and mean fitness per selection line.