The duplication of genomes and gene regulatory networks and its potential for evolutionary adaptation and survival

The importance of whole genome duplication (WGD), or polyploidy, for evolution, is controversial. Whereas some view WGD mainly as detrimental and an evolutionary dead end, there is growing evidence that (the establishment of) polyploidy can help overcome environmental change, stressful conditions, or periods of extinction. However, despite much research, the mechanistic underpinnings of why and how polyploids might be able to outcompete or outlive non-polyploids at times of environmental upheaval remain elusive, especially for autopolyploids, in which heterosis effects are limited. On the longer term, WGD might increase both mutational and environmental robustness due to redundancy and increased genetic variation, but on the short – or even immediate – term, selective advantages of WGDs are harder to explain. Here, by duplicating artificially generated Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs), we show that duplicated GRNs – and thus duplicated genomes – show higher signal output variation than non-duplicated GRNs. This increased variation leads to niche expansion and can provide polyploid populations with substantial advantages to survive environmental turmoil. In contrast, under stable environments, GRNs might be maladaptive to changes, a phenomenon that is exacerbated in duplicated GRNs. We believe that these results provide new insights into how genome duplication and (auto)polyploidy might help organisms to adapt quickly to novel conditions and to survive ecological uproar or even cataclysmic events.