Animals can adapt quickly to survive unfavorable environmental conditions. Evidence is mounting to show that plants can, too. A paper published in the journal Trends in Plant Science details how plants are rapidly adapting to the effects of climate change, and how they are passing down these adaptations to their offspring（后代）.
Plants are facing more environmental stresses than ever. For example, climate change is making winters shorter in many locations, and plants are responding. "Many plants require a minimum period of cold in order to set up their environmental clock to define their flowering time," says Martinelli, a plant geneticist at the University of Florence."As cold seasons shorten, plants have adapted to require shorter periods of cold to delay flowering. These mechanisms allow plants to avoid flowering in periods when they have fewer opportunities to reproduce."
Because plants don't have neural（神经的）networks, their memory is based entirely on cellular（细胞的）, molecular（分子的）, and biochemical networks. These networks make up what the researchers call somatic memory（体细胞记忆）. "It allows plants to recognize the occurrence of a previous environmental condition and to react accordingly," says Martinelli.
These somatic memories can then be passed to the plants' offspring via epigenetics（表现遗传）. "Several examples demonstrate the existence of molecular mechanisms modulating plant memory to environmental stresses and affecting the adaptation of offspring to these stresses," says Martinelli.
Going forward, Martinelli hopes to understand even more about the genes that are being passed down. "We are particularly interested in decoding the epigenetic alphabet without changes in DNA sequence（序列）," he says. "This is especially important when we consider the rapid climate change, we observe today that every living organism, including plants, needs to quickly adapt to survive."
