Challenges and Perspectives in the Epigenetics of Climate Change-Induced Forests Decline

Abstract

Forest tree species are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As sessile organisms with long generation times, their adaptation to a local changing environment may rely on epigenetic modifications when allele frequencies are not able to shift fast enough. However, the current lack of knowledge on this field is remarkable, due to many challenges that researchers face when studying this issue. Huge genome sizes, absence of reference genomes and annotation, and having to analyze huge amounts of data are among these difficulties, which limit the current ability to understand how climate change drives tree species epigenetic modifications. In spite of this challenging framework, some insights on the relationships among climate change-induced stress and epigenomics are coming. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies and an increasing number of studies dealing with this topic must boost our knowledge on tree adaptive capacity to changing environmental conditions. Here, we discuss challenges and perspectives in the epigenetics of climate change-induced forests decline, aiming to provide a general overview of the state of the art.

Keywords: abiotic stress; climate change; epigenetics; forest tree species; methylation.