2024-04-08 - 2024-04-12
Judith Peters
Université Grenoble Alpes
Since the dawn of time, when the first life forms appeared on Earth, they have had to adapt to their environments. Adaptation has always been a constant in the evolution of life: organisms have had to face changing environmental conditions, especially when our planet was also modified due to its considerably greater geological activity than today. Throughout history, living organisms have then found a way to thrive by adjusting to the available nutrients in their habitat or even by collaborating between them in symbiosis, and those that could not do it have disappeared. However, external physical conditions such as temperature, pressure, pH or salinity have also had a major impact on their evolution [1].
Nowadays, we face the impact of climate change on a time scale, which is so short that evolutionary adaptation is almost impossible. Though we find already indications that it might impact our life in unexpected ways making survival more and more complicate [2].
Physical methods give access to many different aspects of adaptation of biosystems to extreme conditions. An overview will be given here of various techniques, including experimental approaches like neutron scattering or NMR and Molecular Dynamics simulations. They permit to understand the long evolutionary processes in the past and shed some light on impacts and possible applications in the present and future world.
[1] Bleuven C, Landry CR. 2016, Molecular and cellular bases of adaptation to a changing environment in microorganisms., Proc. R. Soc. B 283: 20161458.
[2] Wong, C., 2024, Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat — is climate change making it worse? Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04077-0.
