Du Xin, Hu Yisi, Huang Guangping, Wei Fuwen
Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Life Metab. 2022 Dec 28;1(3):234-241. doi: 10.1093/lifemeta/loac040. eCollection 2022 Dec.
Metabolism is the basis for sustaining life and essential to the adaptive evolution of organisms. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, genetic mechanisms of adaptive evolution, including metabolic adaptation, have been extensively resolved by omics approaches, but a deep understanding of genetic and epigenetic metabolic adaptation is still lacking. Exploring metabolic adaptations from genetic and epigenetic perspectives in wild vertebrates is vital to understanding species evolution, especially for the early stages of adaptative evolution. Herein, we summarize the advances in our understanding of metabolic adaptations via omics approaches in wild vertebrates based on three types of cases: extreme environment, periodically changing environment, and changes of species characteristics. We conclude that the understanding of the formation of metabolic adaptations at the genetic level alone can well identify the adaptive genetic variation that has developed during evolution, but cannot resolve the potential impact of metabolic adaptations on the adaptative evolution in the future. Thus, it seems imperative to include epigenomics and metabolomics in the study of adaptation, and that in the future genomic and epigenetic data should be integrated to understand the formation of metabolic adaptation of wild vertebrate organisms.
新陈代谢是维持生命的基础，对生物体的适应性进化至关重要。随着高通量测序技术的发展，包括代谢适应在内的适应性进化的遗传机制已通过组学方法得到广泛解析，但对遗传和表观遗传代谢适应仍缺乏深入了解。从遗传和表观遗传角度探索野生脊椎动物的代谢适应对于理解物种进化至关重要，特别是在适应性进化的早期阶段。在此，我们基于三种情况总结了通过组学方法对野生脊椎动物代谢适应的理解进展：极端环境、周期性变化的环境以及物种特征的变化。我们得出结论，仅在遗传水平上理解代谢适应的形成可以很好地识别进化过程中发展起来的适应性遗传变异，但无法解决代谢适应对未来适应性进化的潜在影响。因此，将表观基因组学和代谢组学纳入适应性研究似乎势在必行，并且未来应整合基因组和表观遗传数据以理解野生脊椎动物生物体代谢适应的形成。
