Population phylogenomics PopPhyl : linking molecular evolution to species biology.
The PopPhyl project aims at understanding the evolutionary forces shaping genome content anddiversity in plants and animals.
— Why are some genomes large, and some small ? Some GC-rich and some GC-poor ?
— What determines the level of genetic polymorphism within species, the rate of divergence between species ?
— Why is codon usage optimized in some, but not all genomes ?
One of the reasons why we have not yet answered these questions is the taxonomic bias of genomic data bases : the large majority of available data concerns a handful of model organisms.
The PopPhyl project will explore the transcriptome of 30 nonmodel plant and animal species, both within and between (closely related) species, thanks to very high-throughput techniques.
These data will give access to estimates of the population genetic parameters (effective population size, mutation rate, recombination rate, selection coefficients, biased gene conversion) typical of each species, to be linked to species life history traits