A new study published in Molecular Ecology by researchers from the IBCC offers a striking example of how plants can adapt rapidly to a changing climate with direct relevance to our mission of understanding and conserving Israel’s biodiversity. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Tel Hai in Kiryat Shmona, University of Haifa, and University of Hawaii, focusing on wild barley, the ancestor of cultivated barley, which grows across Israel’s sharp environmental gradients, from Mediterranean hillsides to the desert edge. They sequenced the genomes of 300 wild barley plants from 30 sites and grew 3,600 offspring in a common garden over three years. Rather than scattered single genes, they found that rapid and synchronized adaptation is driven by clusters of genes they call “haplotype blocks” which are inherited together as one package, bundling drought-, heat-, and flowering-time-related genes that let populations respond to environmental pressure.
By combining genetics with climate models, the team flagged populations at high risk under future climate scenarios including areas that ecological models alone missed. The study underscores a core IBCC theme: genomic data can reveal conservation priorities that ecological surveys may miss, and wild relatives of crop plants are a resource worth protecting both for biodiversity and for food security.
For the full article, continue here > https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.70540