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Molecular evolution meets the genomics revolution

Nature Genetics volume 33, pages 255–265 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Changes in technology in the past decade have had such an impact on the way that molecular evolution research is done that it is difficult now to imagine working in a world without genomics or the Internet. In 1992, GenBank was less than a hundredth of its current size and was updated every three months on a huge spool of tape. Homology searches took 30 minutes and rarely found a hit. Now it is difficult to find sequences with only a few homologs to use as examples for teaching bioinformatics. For molecular evolution researchers, the genomics revolution has showered us with raw data and the information revolution has given us the wherewithal to analyze it. In broad terms, the most significant outcome from these changes has been our newfound ability to examine the evolution of genomes as a whole, enabling us to infer genome-wide evolutionary patterns and to identify subsets of genes whose evolution has been in some way atypical.

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Figure 1: Timeline of developments in bioinformatics, genomics and molecular evolution, charted against the accumulation of DNA sequence information in GenBank, which was established in 1982.
Figure 2: Variation in base composition around the genome of Campylobacter jejuni.
Figure 3: Frequency of deletions and insertions in bacterial genomes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Yi and K. Makova for help, and L. Hurst for comments. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (to W.-H.L.) and from Science Foundation Ireland (to K.H.W.)

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  1. Department of Genetics, Smurfit Institute, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, 2, Ireland

    Kenneth H. Wolfe

  2. Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, 1101 East 57th Street, Chicago, 60637, IL, USA

    Wen-Hsiung Li

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Wolfe, K., Li, WH. Molecular evolution meets the genomics revolution. Nat Genet 33 (Suppl 3), 255–265 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1088

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