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The speed of environmental change is very challenging for wild organisms. When exposed to a new environment individual plants and animals can potentially adjust their biology to better cope with new pressures they are exposed to - this is known as phenotypic plasticity.

Plasticity is likely to be important in the early stages of colonising new places or when exposed to toxic substances in the environment. New research published in , shows that early plasticity can influence the ability to subsequently evolve genetic adaptations to conquer new habitats.

Sea campion, a coastal wildflower from the UK and Ireland has adapted to toxic, zinc rich industrial-era mining waste which kills most other plant species. The zinc-tolerant plants have evolved from zinc-sensitive, coastal populations separately in different places, several times.

To understand the role of plasticity in rapid adaptation, a team of researchers lead by ������ϲʹ������� conducted experiments on sea campion.

As zinc-tolerance has evolved several times, this gave the researchers the opportunity to investigate whether ancestral plasticity made it more likely that the same genes would be used by different populations that were exposed to the same environment.

By exposing the tolerant and sensitive plants to both benign and zinc contaminated environments and measuring changes in the expression of genes in the plant’s roots, the researchers were able to see how plasticity in the coastal ancestors has paved the way for adaptation to take place very quickly.