Final Report Summary - POPPHYL (Population phylogenomics: linking molecular evolution to species biology)
Population genomics, the study of DNA sequence variation between individuals of a given species genome-wide, has been so far restricted to just a handful of separately analyzed model organisms. Distinct molecular evolutionary patterns were observed in distinct species, but the reasons for these differences were unclear. Using Next-Generation Sequencing technologies, the PopPhyl project has produced massive coding sequence polymorphism data sets in 90 ecologically diverse animal species – mammals, birds, turtles, insects, molluscs, annelids, tunicates, echinoderms, nematodes, nemertines, cnidarians – thus offering for the first time a comparative perspective to population genomics. The panel of analyzed species includes pests (e.g. termites), disease vectors (e.g. slipper shells, mosquitoes), commercial fishery species (e.g. blue mussels), submarine ecosystem engineers (e.g. corals), iconic and endangered species (e.g. Galapagos tortoise, King penguin), and curiosities (e.g. the longest animal on earth, the marine worm Lineus longissimus, up to 60m). These data have illuminated the processes of molecular evolution in various groups of animals and highlighted the major effect of effective population size and genetic drift on the rates of molecular evolution. The analysis of the entire data set has revealed that the genetic diversity of species – i.e. by how much conspecific individuals differ from each other – is determined in the first place by key ecological traits related to parental investment: long-lived species with low fecundity and brooding ability (the so-called "K-strategists") are genetically less polymorphic than highly-fecund, short-lived species ("r-strategists"). This demonstrates that the long-term life-history strategy of species influences their response to short-term environmental perturbations, a result with immediate implications in conservation biology.