Epigenetics and methylation: adaptation mediators in plants

Abstract

Living organisms continuously generate new phenotypes in response to the environment and, in turn, new expressions that manifest both at the molecular and morphological levels, which can provide a second inheritance system, very similar to genetic inheritance, which allows evolution by natural selection. Epigenetics has been presented as a new dimension that helps explain how biological populations can achieve high diversity and how they can adapt to unexpected, profound and variable changes in their natural habitat.