Ecological and Evolutionary Functional Genomics-How Can It Contribute to the Risk Assessment of Chemicals?

摘要

Genomics-enabled technologies have transformed ecological, evolutionary, and environmental sciences. The nature of this transformation became obvious at the 2003 Gordon Research Conference on EEFG: Evolutionary and Ecological Functional Genomics,1 after which high quality papers have influenced the environmental science literature. More recently next-generation DNA sequencing has brought about a new revolution, as the nonmodel genomes of environmental science have become as tractable as genomes of classical genetic models. Knowledge in EEFG has grown most dramatically in the evolutionary corner of the science. EEFG has elucidated the gene complement of many a species, identified genomic regions under natural selection, clarified the evolutionary relationships among genes from different species, and better located species in the tree of life. Indeed, the broader phyiogenetic base yielded by the sequencing of nonmodel organisms and sophisticated phylogenomic methods together have enormously advanced genomics, animal phyloge-netics, and evolutionary theory in general. Many accepted evolutionary relationships in the tree of life have undergone revision. For example, life scientists have realized that the two well-investigated model animals, the fruitfly Drosophila and the nematode C. elegans, have a rather derived (specialized) genome and in many respects are unrepresentative of the ancestral gene complement of the Bilateria (two-sided symmetrical animals). Rather, species from the phylum Annelida (ring worms) represent the ancestral gene complement of the bilaterians to a much greater extent.2 Thus, in terms of their genomes, the lowly worm resembles us humans more than do insects and nematodes.