| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
1 Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, California 91125
2 Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4N 3M5, Canada
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: acameron{at}caltech.edu; jrast{at}sri.utoronto.ca
The phrase "genomics of large marine metazoans" is an ungainly mouthful. So are the animals themselves, in most cases. The species addressed in this virtual symposium circumscribe a great catalog of morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic diversity that has fascinated marine scientists for many years. Genome sequences and expressed sequence tag projects provide a means to understand this diversity from a different and in some ways more comprehensive viewpoint. Collectively the animals that are the subject of these papers differ significantly from the standard genetic models that dominate our current understanding of the breadth of animal molecular biology. These differences are reflected in their life history and larger genomes (though by no means unusually large). Their longer life spans may correlate with their often greater genetic complexity. Finally, the marine environment compasses extreme ranges of physical conditions, and understanding the unique genetic features of extremophiles will be helped tremendously by genomic approaches (see Nyholm et al., this issue).
In the end, all of the adaptations that make each marine animal unique can be traced in some manner or other to variations in its genomes. For the developmental biologist, changes in developmental programs are the mechanism by which morphology becomes altered. The gene regulatory networks that compose these programs are hard-wired in the genome (see papers by Magie and Martindale; Materna and Cameron; Sauka-Spengler and Bronner-Fraser; Fahey et al.; this issue). For the physiologist and other scientists interested in the relationship of the organism with its surroundings, the questions may be refocused on genetic programs that regulate the flow of information from the environment through molecular sensors and to biochemical responses (see Reitzel et al., this issue). Much of biology can be viewed as a question of how function is encoded in biological programs and how the programs are maintained in the genome sequence. While this is anything but a trivial problem, genome sequences have the immediate advantage of putting very different animals on relatively equal footing for comparative analysis.
It is certainly true that many of the secrets of an animal remain undecipherable even with a genome sequence in hand, but the often heard lament that genome sequences per se are merely a steppingstone could not be further from the truth. Especially as the knowledge-base of protein structure and function expands, genome sequence data can almost immediately be transformed into often unexpected knowledge about virtually every aspect of the organism. Put another way: all genomics is functional genomics.
The obvious values of genome sequences fall into a few categories:
A welcome revolution in speed and cost of nucleic acid sequencing technology has begun in the last few years. News stories of $1000 human genome sequences abound. While this dazzling goal is still some distance in the future, sequencing projects that were very recently possible only in large government-run facilities will soon be routine at the core facility level and eventually even within the individual laboratory. Of course, this momentum stems from human biomedical goals. Nevertheless, the cost of entire bilaterian genome sequences will move into the realm of individual research grant budgets, and a new genome sequence will be seen as experimental data. The most important outcome of this futurism is the contribution, mentioned above, that genomes make to providing a scientific understanding how an animal works.
It is particularly appropriate that this virtual symposium and its introduction of blatant propaganda in support of genome sequencing be published in The Biological Bulletin, for the home institution of the journal, the Marine Biological Laboratory, has been one of the places where mechanistic biology of marine animals first flourished and where it continues today.
 |
Footnotes |
|---|
|
Literature Cited |
|---|
 TOP Literature Cited |
|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
