Perspectives on future applications of experimental biology to evolution

Summary

The first three decades of the subdiscipline of biology known as “molecular evolution” have generated large amounts of new information that illuminate the nature of evolutionary pattern and process. Major progress has been made in identifying primary sequence variation in genes and their protein products, initially from biochemically tractable systems (from large or culturable organisms and from highly-reiterated genes or highly-expressed gene products). In the 1980s, these techniques that had been limited to specialists, to relatively few representatives of the diversity of life, and to a small number of those organisms’ genes, were extended through advances in molecular genetics and biochemistry, resulting in an explosion of molecular information and a proliferation of molecular trees. Studies of variation in molecular characters also were rarely linked with studies of anatomical, behavioral or ecological diversity. More sophisticated molecular genetic and biochemical techniques, currently being applied to long-standing questions in cell and developmental biology in model systems, should be applicable to more diverse lineages in the next decade. Molecular trees produced from one or more “housekeeping genes” can identify key lineages (species, populations, genomes or gene families) which, by comparison to model systems, may illuminate important aspects of higher level variability. Thus, the next phase of research in the field of molecular evolution should see greater linkage between studies of simple molecular and more complex developmental characters, and increased functional testing of genes and gene products in an evolutionary context. This review highlights some comparative experimental approaches that I believe will be most effective in extending our understanding of molecular evolution and better linking the field to other areas of science in the next few years.

In this work I use “experimental” to refer both to studies in which evolutionary biologists employ molecular methods to observe and quantify genetic variation and comparative studies which test theories about the mechanisms(s) of molecular evolution.