Life is a Game of Evolution

Life is unique in its diversity and evolution is the process for life to become diversified in different levels, including species, populations as well as individuals. To understand life, we need to understand its diversity thus evolution, which can explain the diversity of life in multiple levels, can help us understand life better. What’s more, even for applications in both human health and agricultural improvement, evolution can be helpful as it can provide clues for phenotype/trait consequences of natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, etc. Providing the variations in the molecular level, genomics has now been widely applied to study evolution. Genomes of different species can provide basic information on genome evolution, and comparative genomics utilizing genome sequences of different species can provide information on speciation and hints for genomic basis of phenotypic differentiation. Further, population genomics, studying the genomic variation within the population of one species, would help us understand the evolution of the population, and can be even more informative for phenotype-genotype relationship. In BGI, we constructed genomes for different plant and animal genomes, providing the basis of species evolution studies, and we applied comparative genomics to analyze the evolution of gene/gene families in different species. For important species, especially those crops with agricultural significance, we applied population genomics to reveal the evolution of those populations, in the meantime to identify possible genomic features related with agriculturally important traits, some of which also have gone through further functional validation.