Linck Ethan B, Cadena Carlos Daniel
Department of Ecology, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, USA.
Departamento de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
Mol Ecol. 2024 Oct 14:e17551. doi: 10.1111/mec.17551.
Global inequality rooted in legacies of colonialism and uneven development can lead to systematic biases in scientific knowledge. In ecology and evolutionary biology, findings, funding and research effort are disproportionately concentrated at high latitudes, while biological diversity is concentrated at low latitudes. This discrepancy may have a particular influence in fields like phylogeography, molecular ecology and conservation genetics, where the rise of genomics has increased the cost and technical expertise required to apply state-of-the-art methods. Here, we ask whether a fundamental biogeographic pattern-the latitudinal gradient of species richness in tetrapods-is reflected in the available reference genomes, an important data resource for various applications of molecular tools for biodiversity research and conservation. We also ask whether sequencing approaches differ between the Global South and Global North, reviewing the last 5 years of conservation genetics research in four leading journals. We find that extant reference genomes are scarce relative to species richness at low latitudes and that reduced representation and whole-genome sequencing are disproportionately applied to taxa in the Global North. We conclude with recommendations to close this gap and improve international collaborations in biodiversity genomics.
源于殖民主义遗产和不均衡发展的全球不平等会导致科学知识出现系统性偏差。在生态学和进化生物学领域，研究结果、资金和研究工作不成比例地集中在高纬度地区，而生物多样性却集中在低纬度地区。这种差异可能在系统发育地理学、分子生态学和保护遗传学等领域产生特别的影响，在这些领域，基因组学的兴起增加了应用前沿方法所需的成本和技术专长。在此，我们探讨一个基本的生物地理模式——四足动物物种丰富度的纬度梯度——是否反映在现有的参考基因组中，参考基因组是用于生物多样性研究和保护的各种分子工具应用的重要数据资源。我们还探讨全球南方和全球北方的测序方法是否存在差异，回顾了四种领先期刊中过去五年的保护遗传学研究。我们发现，相对于低纬度地区的物种丰富度而言，现存的参考基因组很稀少，并且简化基因组代表性测序和全基因组测序在全球北方的分类群中应用得不成比例。我们最后提出了缩小这一差距并改善生物多样性基因组学国际合作的建议。
