Department of Population Ecology

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Our department is proud to be part of the organizing team for this amazing conference on population biology and beyond! 🌿 Don't miss this great opportunity to visit Prague in the spring! 🌸 #PopBio2025 #ScienceConference #Ecology"

DNA methylation shows footprints of altitude selection in the clonal plant species Fragaria vesca ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Env. change can push plants beyond their genetic limits, but heritable epigenetic changes may offer a fast track to adaptation. Our study on clonal woodland strawberry shows altitude-driven selection on epialleles, suggesting DNA methylation could help plants thrive under changing environment.

BTW, the journal issue's cover picture shows our mycorrhizal model.🧪

Stay tuned for the full story on how clonal vs. sexual reproduction can shift the power of TGP!
#TransgenerationalPlasticity #Mycorrhiza
#Epigenetics #PlantSymbiosis

It seems clonal offspring aren’t as enthusiastic about forming mycorrhizal partnerships—and that difference also shows up in their inherited epigenetic profiles. We’re busy digging deeper into these epigenetic data, and the results are looking juicy.

We hypothesized that clonal offspring might carry more of that epigenetic memory (because they skip meiosis), but guess what? Mycorrhizal fungi sparked stronger TGP in sexual Fragaria vesca offspring than in clonal ones! Why?

Transgenerational effects of mycorrhiza are stronger in sexual than in clonal offspring of Fragaria vesca and are partly adaptive These results suggest that clonal and sexual reproduction are under different evolutionary pressures, leading to the development of stronger TGE mechanisms in response to mycorrhizal symbiosis in the...

Check out our new paper in Journal of Ecology! We’ve been delving into transgenerational plasticity (TGP)—that cool mechanism where plants “prep” their offspring for future environments. Our big question? Whether clonal and sexual offspring from the same parent plants show similar TGP.

Whether clonal and sexual offspring from the same parent plants show similar TGP.We hypothesized that clonal offspring might carry more of that epigenetic memory (because they skip meiosis) but guess what? Mycorrhizal fungi sparked stronger TGP in sexual Fragaria vesca offspring than in clonal ones!