Next Generation Molecular Ecology

Calling a special issue of Molecular Ecology that deals with next-generation sequencing ‘Next generation Molecular Ecology’ seems to be all too obvious. However, as the contributions to this issue came in, it became increasingly clear that next-generation sequencing (NGS) is more than just a technical leap – it will result in a transformation of how we think about molecular ecology as a discipline. Progress in molecular ecology has always been driven by advances in DNA technologies, but the current revolution could not really be foreseen. ‘Ecological genomics’ has suddenly become a valid emerging discipline. Contemporary biology covers already an enormous scale. On the one hand, structural biologists are discovering how basic cellular processes occur at the atomic level. On the other, ecologists are trying to predict how climate change will affect broad patterns of biodiversity across the entire planet. But these fields have heretofore not been continuous, and there has been a glaring gap in connecting genetic processes in individual organisms with ecological processes that result from the interaction of many individuals in an ecosystem. One reason for this has been that model species for evolutionary and ecological research have typically suffered from a lack of genetic tools, while conversely very little, if anything, has been known about the ecology of well-established genetic models. The power of genetics in dissecting basic cellular and developmental processes is undisputed, particularly since the addition in the past decade of a broad range of genomic tools. Its power has also been increasingly exploited to understand the interaction between different organisms, such as pathogens and their hosts. Because of the technological investments required, genetic and genomic approaches have, however, traditionally been applied only to a small set of carefully chosen model species. These species, such as nematode worms, fruit flies or the small cabbage relative Arabidopsis, are typically adapted to the laboratory environment and are usually genetically inbred. They necessarily represent abstractions of biological systems, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to infer from