Barcoding Marine Life Blog

When genomics meets marine ecology

June 01, 2007

DNA characterization has given us new means to understand the morphological disparity and the lack thereof among organisms. It has also provided new methods for grasping the evolutionary context and phylogenetic history of diversity. These new technologies have already made a large impact in most fields of biology, not least in systematics, and many recent taxonomic revisions are based on insights from DNA studies.
A new article in the Marine Ecology Progress Series by Dupont et al. summarizes the potential of the 'omic' technologies such as genomics for marine ecology. Fundamental ecological questions might be answerable utilizing genome technologies, microarrays, proteomics and barcoding.
What is the relationship between community structure and ecological function in ecosystems?
How can a species and the phylogenetic relationship between taxa be identified?
What are the factors responsible for the limits of the ecological niche?
What explains the variations in life-history patterns among species?
This list could be continued endlessly and Dupont et al. state "The ecological applications of a universal molecular identification system resulting from a marine barcoding program are vast and would improve the quality of ecological surveys tremendously, in particular in those that contain species difficult to identify."