Plants adapt to climate change using genetic shortcuts
When we consider whether a particular plant or animal can adapt to global warming, we often worry that evolution can take hundreds of years or more to reflect environmental changes.
That’s one reason for concern about the abruptness of the temperature rise we’re seeing around the globe. A recent analysis found plants have faced temperatures averaging more than 1 degree Fahrenheit higher every decade since 1982.
This is dauntingly fast.
Yet the analysis, published in Earth’s Future in late 2024, found much of the world’s greenery is doing remarkably well at adapting to the extra heat.
I’ve mentioned that study before, but today I bring it up in the context of a more recent paper similarly led by researchers at institutions affiliated with Beijing’s Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The second group of researchers provided details on the specific evolutionary shortcut that allows plants to adapt to rapid temperature changes.
Together, these research efforts shine a ray of hope about the ability of plants—the root of the entire world’s food chain—to adapt to our rapidly warming climate.
Mysterious assistance
About four decades ago, when temperatures began their meteoric rise above the long-term norm, my budding interest in science got a boost from a college lesson that seemed to challenge one of the underpinnings of life sciences—genetics.
Our biology instructor was explaining how DNA worked. As a reminder, DNA provides the blueprint for life to exist, reproduce and evolve. The nucleic acids comprising DNA serve as a genetic code that tells our cells what to do, such as which proteins to make.
But something odd was occurring that 1980s science couldn’t explain. For instance, he told us, sometimes errors in the genetic code would be corrected by some unknown force acting above the genes.
Scientists dubbed the mysterious corrective force “control genes,” in my recollection. But the puzzle remained. As my biology instructor put it, “Who controls the control genes?”
Scientists now lump this mysterious tinkering with the genetic code into “epigenetics.” (“Control genes” has a different meaning now, in our era of gene tweaking.) Epigenetics translates as “above the genes.”
And this year, a team of scientists from a variety of Chinese institutions shared a detailed example of the mechanism behind at least one form of epigenetics—one that allowed plants to adapt to changing temperatures.
Epigenetics in tribal communities
Epigenetics joined my own vocabulary about a decade ago, when I was tapped to teach introductory biology at Tohono O’odham Community College. Because I tend to focus on big-picture issues such as how forests and climate interact, I had some catching up to do in genetics, such as advances in the field now known as epigenetics.
Epigenetics is considered an important phenomenon in tribal communities.
Research indicates epigenetics help explain why Indigenous peoples struggle with a greater burden of a variety of illnesses, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer: They carry some of their ancestors’ trauma from centuries of land loss and attempted genocide.
Even education contributed. Many children from tribal nations were forced to move to abusive boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their languages or participating in their spiritual practices. Thousands of children died from boarding school abuse, and many more were deeply traumatized.
This line of inquiry also has helped identify ways to reduce the effects of the inherited trauma. Proponents suggest participating in meaningful cultural practices can help counter the impact of epigenetic changes.
Yet despite our growing understanding that something above the genes can affect descendants, it’s been difficult to identify exactly how epigenetics operates.
Shortcuts to adaptation
The research by Song and colleagues basically looked under the hood to see how these changes occur. The scientists even homed in on the location of at least one portion of the DNA code where epigenetic control operated.
As described in a May 2025 journal article in Cell, Song and team subjected several varieties of Asian rice to cold spells during a formative stage.
They found several strains grew well and produced abundant successful seeds despite their exposure to cold temperatures. What’s more, these strains were able to pass on their newly acquired adaptation to the cold without changing any genetic coding in their DNA.
It turns out all they had to do to adapt was use a molecule known as a methyl group to effectively turn off the gene coding for cold sensitivity. (For more details, see the sidebar at the end of this essay.) This allowed individual rice plants to thrive in temperatures much cooler than the tropical climes where they originated.
Their research showed precisely how epigenetics can help some plants quickly adapt to climate changes.
Plants adapting to warmer climes
In the context of the revealing work by Song and colleagues, the findings of another research effort make more sense. The research led by Yiheng Wang and other scientists from China, India and New Zealand, found modern-day plants around the world are adapting more quickly than expected to the warmer temperatures of recent decades.
Their analysis of data collected from satellites and field work between 1982 and 2020 found plants overall have managed to bump up their ideal temperature for growing—known as their optimum temperature for photosynthesis—to keep up with the observed temperature rise.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Overall, the world’s plants have responded to global warming overall by bumping up the temperature at which they do their most productive work. This was especially true in rainforests and polar regions.
In others words, when the planet raised temperatures by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit a decade, plants responded by matching that. They stayed in the game.
A carbon dioxide booster shot
The global analysis showing plants were maintaining a robust ability to grow under higher temperatures supported earlier investigations at the leaf level. For instance, the same lead author, Yiheng Wang, led a study published in the fall of 2024 showing the optimum temperature for growth of rice and wheat plants rose with higher carbon dioxide levels.
Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas that boosts temperatures. Its rise and fall in the atmosphere across the ages largely accounts for the planet’s overall climate, such as whether Earth falls into an ice age or deals with the high temperatures of a mostly ice-free hothouse.
Carbon dioxide has risen by half since humans started burning the coal, oil and natural gas known as fossil fuels. We’ve already been witnessing the resulting temperature rise. The past 10 years are the hottest in our temperature record as measured by modern instruments.
But this airborne molecule also serves as the main component of plant food. Water is the other main ingredient.
I’ve used the long-standing connection between plants and carbon dioxide to argue in my 2010 University of Arizona Press book and in Eco-Logic posts (see Related Reading) that the world’s plants tend to thrive in warmer climates—in part because higher carbon dioxide levels help plants adapt to the higher heat.
It’s not clear whether epigenetics plays a key role in modern plants’ ability to adjust to the heat. Still, it’s nice to have insights on a shortcut that can help plants keep up with temperature changes.
The various lines of evidence suggest we don’t necessarily have to go through a barren phase before plants adapt to climate change, as long as we leave them room to grow.
Humans face many challenges with the ongoing temperature rise if we don’t slow down on our fossil fuel use. These include rising sea levels obliterating cities, high heat sparking more wildfires and deaths, higher evaporation rates depleting reservoirs, and even cognitive decline under the kind of carbon dioxide levels associated with hothouse climates.
Still, if we’re going to run this risky experiment on our precious planet, it’s good news that our plant allies, at least, can successfully—and sometimes quickly—adapt to the changes.
Sidebar: The mechanism behind rapid adaptation
When we think about evolution, we tend to think it takes thousands of years to adapt to factors such as temperature changes.
First, we have to wait for a mutation, the expectation generally goes. Then, we have to wait for the progeny of the plants or animals in question to inherit the adaptive mutation. Finally, perhaps centuries later, those adaptive traits might dominate.
Epigenetics has turned this expected time frame on its head. As noted above, the researchers who published the Cell paper found cold sensitivity could quickly be suppressed by a methyl group.
Methane, a type of natural gas, is composed of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. Methyl groups leave off one hydrogen atom so they can connect to other elements and compounds. When located above a gene, the presence of a methyl group—one carbon and three hydrogen molecules—acts as a switch to hide the stretch of code below.
These methyl groups, also known as “non-coding DNA,” control if and when underlying genes are expressed. The mechanism is known as methylation. It can affect a variety of inherited traits in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.