Organisms in a changing world

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Since its foundation in 1999 by Lawrence Hightower, the Cell Stress Society International (CSSI) has actively promoted international collaboration in the field of stress research. Over the years, the Society has gone from strength to strength, with one of its main, and highly, visible outputs being the journal ‘Cell Stress & Chaperones’. Although initially, the full title of the journal was ‘Cell Stress & Chaperones: An Integrative Journal of Stress Biology and Medicine’ with an emphasis on the medical field, original scientific articles were always welcomed from a wide range of organisms and different aspects of stress molecular biology. However, in 2020, the sub-title was expanded to ‘An Integrative Journal of Stress Biology, Medicine and the Environment’, in acknowledgement of the increasing importance of understanding the cellular stress response in nonmodel environmental species in the context of the current climate crisis. Initial plans to celebrate the change in subtitle with a special environmental issue were somewhat stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, finally, 3 years later, we are proud to present this special issue ‘Organisms in a Changing Environment’, which highlights the wide variety of stress response research being carried out in environmental species. In particular, these studies demonstrate how important it is to understand not only the environmental cellular stress response but also their integration with higher levels of biological organisation to understand future biodiversity, and inform conservation measures and policy in our changing world. This special issue starts with a Perspective and Reflection article, in which Gershoni discusses the ‘Transgenerational transmission of environmental effects in livestock in the age of global warming’ (Gershoni 2023). Estimates suggest that annual losses of up to $2.4 billion occur in the US livestock industry due to the effects of global warming on farm animals. Whilst the immediate effects of heat stress on livestock, for example on meat and milk production, animal health and welfare and reproduction, have been well documented, much less is known about the longerterm transgenerational effects of heat stress and epigenetic inheritance. These multigenerational studies require detailed animal pedigrees and environmental metadata, which are much more difficult to obtain in livestock compared with the standard epigenetic lab models of rats and mice, due to longer generation times and greatly increased housing and feed costs. In this perspective, Gershoni reviews the available data and discusses how the results can be used to optimise breeding strategies to overcome the potential negative effects of warming entrained by epigenetic factors during critical periods in livestocks’ life histories, and to protect livestock-based food security. The next two articles are both reviews addressing the core subject area of the Cell Stress & Chaperones journal, namely heat shock proteins. The first by Storey and Storey ‘Chaperone proteins: universal roles in surviving environmental stress’ (Storey and Storey 2022) quite rightly points out that only humans can bend their environment to suit themselves, all other organisms have had to develop mechanisms to enable them to adapt their basic metabolism to their particular habitat and associated environmental stresses. Storey and Storey (2022) describe recent advances in our understanding of how chaperone proteins are regulated in response to adverse conditions, when animals resort to a variety of survival strategies including torpor/hibernation, anaerobic metabolism, estivation and cold/freeze tolerance. Out of all the articles in this special issue, this review particularly demonstrates that even a relatively simple environmental question, such as ‘How do organisms survive adverse conditions?’ may require a gamut of highly diverse species to * Melody S. Clark mscl@bas.ac.uk