Thermal Plasticity and Evolutionary Constraints in Bacillus: Implications for Climate Change Adaptation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ongoing rise in global temperatures poses significant challenges to ecosystems, particularly impacting bacterial communities that are central to biogeochemical cycles. The resilience of wild mesophilic bacteria to temperature increases of 2–4 °C remains poorly understood. In this study, we conducted experimental evolution on six wild Bacillus strains from two lineages (Bacillus cereus and Bacillus subtilis) to examine their thermal adaptation strategies. We exposed the bacteria to gradually increasing temperatures to assess their thermal plasticity, focusing on the genetic mechanisms underlying adaptation. While B. subtilis lineages improved growth at highly critical temperatures, only one increased its thermal niche to 4 °C above their natural range. This finding is concerning given climate change projections. B. cereus strains exhibited higher mutation rates but were not able to grow at increasing temperatures, while B. subtilis required fewer genetic changes to increase heat tolerance, indicating distinct adaptive strategies. We observed convergent evolution in five evolved lines, with mutations in genes involved in c-di-AMP synthesis, which is crucial for potassium transport, implicating this chemical messenger for the first time in heat tolerance. These insights highlight the vulnerability of bacteria to climate change and underscore the importance of genetic background in shaping thermal adaptation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".