Department of Population Ecology

Iris Sammarco from our department received the Award of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Iris Sammarco, who works on plant adaptation to climate change, received the Award of the Czech Academy of Sciences for Young Scientists for outstanding results in research, experimental development and innovation achieved in research tasks supported by the CAS until the age of 35. Her research has shown that environmentally induced epigenetic variability is heritable and allows plants to adapt to changing natural conditions. Her work has made a significant contribution to the understanding of how plants respond to climate change and shows that epigenetic processes play a key role in the activation of specific genes and the regulation of transposons. Read more about her research on her profile or under the research topic of ecological epigenetics within our web pages.

Check her recent paper 🙂

Sammarco I, Díez Rodríguez B, Galanti G, Nunn A, Becker C, Bossdorf O, Münzbergová ZLatzel V (2024) DNA methylation in the wild: epigenetic transgenerational inheritance can mediate adaptation in clones of wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca). New Phytologist 241, 1621–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19464