Andrew Kern

Dude. You sound like Lewontin when he thought sequencing the human genome was gonna be a waste of time for human health...

Build it, and they will come.

Exactly!

More like, NIH already paid for all these sequencers and for the personnel to run them, we need to keep them busy or people might think we wasted our money.

Or more like, ecological genomics are already exploding and having the genomes of non-model species does matter to understand their potential for adaptation in the face of dramatic environmental changes.

I'm personally skeptical that one can learn anything about adaptability or lack thereof from genome sequence.

I am more optimistic about this. To me it is a clear case where past adaptations and their amount are informative about the future. Many evolutionary ecologists have also recently started great study models to ask this question.

From what I know of human genetics, though, don't you need hundreds or thousands of individuals from any one species to begin to look for signs of selection in the genome? I'm down for that kind of ecological genomics, btw, less so for sequencing many individual species.

We have come to the point where genomes should precede question in order to no longer limit questions. I am going to put these genomes to good use.

We would have had trouble doing our elephant and mammoth work without these genome(s). I doubt they were crazy enough to be like, "Hey let's look at CNVs in extinct elephantids with these!" I think you have to have some question at the start, but there will always be more.

Yes, and some questions simply transcend particular species. I will quantify the impact of pathogens on genomic adaptation in 1,000 vertebrate species if I am given the opportunity, and characterize what drives differences in the environment.

YOU have a crappy genome