Towards Genome-Enabled Conservation in Fishes

Conservation genetics has been defined as the application of genetic concepts and methods towards the preservation of species as dynamic entities able to adaptively respond to environmental changes. In this respect, molecular data can play 2 fundamental roles. The first one is inventorial, pertains to documenting patterns of genetic diversity, and has largely dominated the literature until now. The second role is mechanistic, referring to deciphering ecological and evolutionary processes and has been hampered by the logistical difficulty of investigating functional genetic variation in natural populations of non-model species. The genomic revolution that we have now fully stepped into is expected to solve many of these previous constraints and further enhance the usefulness of molecular data in conservation, namely by i) Scaling up the genome coverage for any non-model species, and thus improving estimates of population genetic and evolutionary parameters; ii) Identifying markers « that counts » and bringing us closer to the elucidation of adaptive significance of molecular variation, and iii) Get to the « real stuff » for conservation genetics, that is, finding causal relationships between genetic variation and phenotypes to predict future dynamics of important genetic variation and potential for adaptation to new environments. In this talk, I will discuss those issues and illustrate from our own work how genomics can contribute to improve our knowledge in 3 general topics of direct relevance to conservation genetics: the genomic basis of adaptive divergence, the definition of management units and the dynamics of introgressive hybridization resulting from stocking. I will also use these examples to compare the pros- and cons- of different genotyping strategies.