Interactions between thermal and nutritional stress reveal cryptic adaptive potential

Authors

Walter, G. M., Chakraborty, A., Yates, L. A., Cockerell, F., White, C., Sgro, C.

Abstract

Predicting whether populations can adapt fast enough to persist under global change requires understanding how adaptive potential changes with the environment. Theory predicts that cryptic genetic variation hidden under benign conditions may be released under stress, but empirical tests are rare and typically manipulate single stressors in isolation, which is not realistic under global change. Using a quantitative genetic breeding design with Drosophila melanogaster, we quantified additive genetic variance in fitness (female productivity) across combinations of temperature and nutritional stress. We found that nutritional stress increased genetic variance at cold and hot margins. Temperature and diet also interacted to shape which genotypes performed best: nutritional stress weakened genetic correlations across temperatures at the hot margin, whereas genetic correlations across diets strengthened at the cold margin. Adaptive potential is therefore environment-dependent and multidimensional, meaning single stressor experiments are likely to systematically misrepresent adaptive capacity under realistic global change scenarios.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 24 Oct 2026.

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