Merging Ecology, Molecular Evolution, and Functional Genetics

'This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.' This has to be one of the boldest understatements in all of biology, written 50 years ago in Nature by Francis Crick and Jim Watson in describing their model for the DNA double helix (Watson & Crick 1953). The unveiling of the structure of the molecule that carries the hereditary information of living organisms is rightly hailed as a landmark in the history of science, and we rightly celebrate the golden anniversary of this discovery this year. Understanding the molecular basis of genes has transformed biological research since 1953, and ecologists have participated in the fruits of this revolution. The use of molecular markers, beginning with restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) to today's single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), has had a significant impact on our ability to trace parentage and kinship, to measure gene flow and migration patterns and to reconstruct the demographic histories of populations and species. Few will argue that the advent of modern genetic technology has provided an unparalleled ability to examine evolutionary and ecological forces in nature. Yet the full impact of molecular genetics (and today, genomics) has yet to be felt by the discipline of ecology. While the use of molecular markers by ecologists has been fruitful, there is more to the molecules than their current dominant role in ecological research as mere genetic barcodes. We have yet to understand ecological processes at a fundamentally molecular level, and our inability to make this connection from the ecological gene to the ecological organism hampers any dreams we may harbour of creating a unified picture of life. We do not know, to a large extent, the interplay between genes and the ecological processes that dominate life at and above the organ-ismal level. We stand today at a crossroads that provide unprecedented opportunity to make these connections. Molecular biologists have proved adept at unravelling the molecular mechanisms behind many of the physiological, developmental and at times behavioural processes that characterize organismal lives. It is time that ecologists make use of this information in meaningful ways to gain further insights into the nature of organismal ecologies. How do we go about doing this? There is no one single answer to this question. There remains no single coherent program of molecular ecology. But it is the diversity of approaches that make this an interesting enterprise, and in this issue we …