Department of Environmental Toxicology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
J Exp Biol. 2012 Mar 15;215(Pt 6):884-91. doi: 10.1242/jeb.058735.
Organisms that live in variable environments must adjust their physiology to compensate for environmental change. Modern functional genomics technologies offer global top-down discovery-based tools for identifying and exploring the mechanistic basis by which organisms respond physiologically to a detected change in the environment. Given that populations and species from different niches may exhibit different acclimation abilities, comparative genomic approaches may offer more nuanced understanding of acclimation responses, and provide insight into the mechanistic and genomic basis of variable acclimation. The physiological genomics literature is large and growing, as is the comparative evolutionary genomics literature. Yet, expansion of physiological genomics experiments to exploit taxonomic variation remains relatively undeveloped. Here, recent advances in the emerging field of comparative physiological genomics are considered, including examples of plants, bees and fish, and opportunities for further development are outlined particularly in the context of climate change research. Elements of robust experimental design are discussed with emphasis on the phylogenetic comparative approach. Understanding how acclimation ability is partitioned among populations and species in nature, and knowledge of the relevant genes and mechanisms, will be important for characterizing and predicting the ecological and evolutionary consequences of human-accelerated environmental change.
生活在多变环境中的生物必须调整其生理机能以适应环境变化。现代功能基因组学技术为识别和探索生物对环境变化的生理反应的机制基础提供了全局自上而下的基于发现的工具。鉴于来自不同小生境的种群和物种可能表现出不同的适应能力，比较基因组学方法可能提供对适应反应的更细致的理解，并深入了解可变适应的机制和基因组基础。生理基因组学文献数量庞大且不断增加，比较进化基因组学文献也是如此。然而，将生理基因组学实验扩展到利用分类学变异仍然相对不发达。在这里，考虑了新兴比较生理基因组学领域的最新进展，包括植物、蜜蜂和鱼类的例子，并特别在气候变化研究的背景下概述了进一步发展的机会。强调了系统发育比较方法，讨论了稳健实验设计的要素。了解适应能力在自然界中如何在种群和物种之间分配，以及相关基因和机制的知识，对于描述和预测人类加速的环境变化的生态和进化后果将是重要的。
