Plasticity and adaptation of development in natural populations of Platynereis.

Sampling genetically diverse populations of Platynereisdumerlii over an environmental gradient during the TREC expedition affords a unique opportunity to identify signatures of cellular adaptation to temperature. We perform (1) individual-embryo single cell-RNA-seq to examine adaptive variation in whole-animal cell composition; (2) “common garden” experiment to explicitly test for adaptation of Platynereis to local temperatures from northern (Sweden) and southern (Italy) Europe. This project exemplifies the Planetary Biology principle by optimizing new molecular methods in the lab to sample wild populations of Platynereis, and analyse cellular adaptation in a natural environment.

Collaborators

Arendt group, EMBL Heidelberg