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Living organisms must constantly adjust to changes in their environment, and temperature is one of the most important stressors they face. Even small shifts in heat can disrupt cellular balance and alter how genes function. As climate variability and extreme heat events increase, understanding how different species maintain stability is becoming more important for biology, health, agriculture and ecosystem resilience. To explore this, FAU researchers and collaborators studied how mammalian cells respond to temperature changes at the genetic level, focusing on skin fibroblasts, cells that help maintain tissue structure. They then compared humans and one-humped camels, a species known for thriving in extreme heat.

To overcome limits of traditional methods that require large datasets, the researchers developed a new approach that measures how much genes change – rather than simply whether they increase or decrease. This allowed them to identify groups of genes involved in maintaining cellular stability and build models of how genes interact under normal and heat-stressed conditions. Findings, published in BMC Genomics, show that these models can be built with smaller datasets while still capturing meaningful biological patterns. Using this framework, the team discovered that camels show greater cellular resilience than humans under both moderate and extreme temperatures, offering new insight into how organisms adapt to heat stress and providing a broader tool for studying biological and ecological responses to environmental change.

“This research gives us a fundamentally new way to think about resilience in biological systems,” said Valery Forbes, Ph.D., co-author, professor of biological sciences and dean of FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. “By focusing on how gene expression variability changes under stress, we can identify mechanisms that help some species maintain stability while others become more vulnerable. This approach also works with limited data, making it useful for studying how organisms respond to climate shifts and other environmental pressures even when sample sizes are small.”

Read the press release.