基因组结构信息在动物系统发育研究中的应用

随着人类基因组和一些模式生物、重要经济生物以及大量微生物基因组测序的完成,生物学整体研究业已进入基因组时代.最近5～10年以来,利用基因组结构信息进行系统发育推断的研究形成了分类学和进化生物学中的前沿领域之一.相对于核苷酸或氨基酸序列中的突变而言,基因组的结构变化--内含子的插入/缺失、反转录子的整合、签名序列、基因重复以及基因排序等--是更大空间(或者时间空间)尺度上的相对稀缺的系统发育信息,一般用于科和科以上阶元间的亲缘关系研究.基因组全序列的获得和其中各基因位置的确定有利于将基因组中不同层次的系统发育信息综合起来,利用全面分子证据(total molecular evidence;包括基因组信息,DNA、RNA、蛋白质的序列信息,RNA和蛋白质的高级结构等)进行分子系统学研究.

THE APPLICATION OF GENOME STRUCTURE INFORMATION IN THE STUDIES OF ANIMAL PHYLOGENY

As the genome projects of human, some model species, some economic important species and many microbe species have been accomplished, biology has entered into the era of genome. Since 10 years ago, the phylogeny studies utilizing the information of genome structure have been forming one of the forelands in evolutionary biology and systematics. Comparing to the mutations in nucleotide or amino-acid sequence, the changes of genome structure, such as the indels of introns, retroposon integrations, signature sequences, gene duplications and gene order rearrangements, are the rare phylogenetic information in larger time-space scale. Generally, the information can only be used in the phylogeny studies focusing on the taxa higher than family level. The knowledge about all the details of genome will make it possible to synthesize the genome information at different levels and to use total molecular evidence, including genome structure, DNA/RNA or protein sequences, the secondary of RNA and the three-dimensional structure of protein, in the study of molecular systematics.