Conservation Mitonuclear Replacement: Facilitated mitochondrial adaptation for a changing world

Most species will not be able to migrate fast enough to cope with climate change, nor evolve quickly enough with current levels of genetic variation. Exacerbating the problem are anthropogenic influences on adaptive potential, including the prevention of gene flow through habitat fragmentation and the erosion of genetic diversity in small, bottlenecked populations. Facilitated adaptation, or assisted evolution, offers a way to augment adaptive genetic variation via artificial selection, induced hybridization, or genetic engineering. One key source of genetic variation, particularly for climatic adaptation, are the core metabolic genes encoded by the mitochondrial genome. These genes influence environmental tolerance to heat, drought, and hypoxia, but must interact intimately and co-evolve with a suite of important nuclear genes. These coadapted mitonuclear genes form some of the important reproductive barriers between species. Mitochondrial genomes can and do introgress between species in an adaptive manner, and they may co-introgress with nuclear genes important for maintaining mitonuclear compatibility. Managers should consider the relevance of mitonuclear genetic variability in conservation decision-making, including as a tool for facilitating adaptation. I propose a novel technique dubbed Conservation Mitonuclear Replacement (CmNR), which entails replacing the core metabolic machinery of a threatened species-the mitochondrial genome and key nuclear loci-with those from a closely related species or a divergent population, which may be better-adapted to climatic changes or carry a lower genetic load. The most feasible route to CmNR is to combine CRISPR-based nuclear genetic editing with mitochondrial replacement and assisted reproductive technologies. This method preserves much of an organism's phenotype and could allow populations to persist in the wild when no other suitable conservation options exist. The technique could be particularly important on mountaintops, where rising temperatures threaten an alarming number of species with almost certain extinction in the next century.

Celebrating 10 Years in research publishing: scientific traditions of Open-Access Journal CARDIOMETRY as the mirror of fundamental and applied biomedical problems

The 10th anniversary of the international journal CARDIOMETRY is a good opportunity to summarize achievements and highlight the important milestones in the life of the journal with respect to the contents of the journal associated with most advanced research information about the topical issues in cardiology and allied sciences biology and medicine. The ideas on a system-related approach and an integrative assessment of the actual organism status as a whole, which lay the foundation of the journal philosophy, allows covering as wide as possible a great variety of the aspect what is the norm and what is pathology that is a substantial prerequisite for delineating clearly structured themes treated by each issue of the journal and for making in such a manner a collection of the journal issues, with cardiology as a common thread, that distinguishes CARDIOMETRY from all other profiled scientific journals.