Download PDF An Introduction to Ecological Genomics by Nico M. van Straalen and Dick Roelofs

Sinopsis

The twentieth century has been called the ‘century of the gene’ (Fox Keller 2000). It began with the rediscovery in 1900 of the laws of inheritance by DeVries, Correns, and Von Tschermak, laws that had been formulated about 40 years earlier by Gregor Mendel. With the appearance of the Royal Horticultural Society’s English translation of Mendel’s papers, William Bateson suggested in a letter in 1902 that this new area of biology be called genetics. The word gene followed, coined by Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen in 1909, and then in 1920 the German botanist Hans Winkler proposed the word genome. The term genomics did not appear until the mid-1980s and was introduced in  1987 as the name of a new journal (McKusick and Ruddle 1987). The century ended with the genomics revolution, culminating in the announcement of the completion of a draft version of the humane genome in the year 2000.

Realizing the importance of Mendel’s papers, William Bateson announced that genetics was to become the most promising research area of the life sciences. One hundred years later one cannot avoid the conclusion that the progress in understanding the role of genes in living systems indeed has been astonishing. The genomics revolution has now expanded beyond genetics, its impact being felt in many other areas of the life sciences, including ecology. In the ecological arena, the interaction between genomics and ecology has led to a new field of research, evolutionary and ecological functional genomics. Feder and Mitchell-Olds (2003) indicated that this new multidiscipline ‘focuses on the genes that affect evolutionary fitness in naturalenvironments and populations’.

Our definition of ecological genomics given above seems at first sight to include the basic aim of ecology, viewing genomics as a new tool for analysing fundamental ecological questions. However, the merging of genomics with ecology includes more than the incorporation of a toolbox, because with the new technology new scientific questions emerge and existing questions can be answered in a way that was not considered before.

Content

1. What is ecological genomics?
2. Genome analysis
3. Comparing genomes
4. Structure and function in communities
5. Life-history patterns
6. Stress responses
7. Integrative ecological genomics

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