An interdisciplinary team in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences — in an initiative aimed at better understanding the implications of climate change for animal and plant life and agricultural systems — is focusing on an emerging field of study called landscape transcriptomics.
An interdisciplinary team in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences — in an initiative aimed at better understanding the implications of climate change for animal and plant life and agricultural systems — is focusing on an emerging field of study called landscape transcriptomics.
In an invited technical review paper recently published in Molecular Ecology Resources, team leader Jason Keagy, assistant research professor of wildlife behavioral ecology, explained that landscape transcriptomics studies how patterns of gene expression in living organisms relate to changes in environment — including habitat, weather, climate and contaminants — as well as the subsequent effects on the function of plants and animals.
He explained that a transcriptome is the total of all the RNA molecules expressed from the genes of an organism, essentially a collection of all the gene readouts present in a cell. By looking at finer-scale gene expression differences over larger-scale environments, trends emerge that offer new insight into how life on Earth is adapting to change, he said.
We sat down with Keagy to learn more about the new, complex field.
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