The Origins of Genome Architecture

by Michael Lynch

With official genomic blueprints now available for hundreds of species, and thousands more expected in the near future, the field of biology has been forever transformed. Such readily accessible data have encouraged the proliferation of adaptive arguments for the evolution of gene and genomic features, often with little or no attention being given to simpler and more powerful alternative explanations. By integrating the central observations from molecular biology and population genetics relevant to comparative genomics, Lynch shows why the details matter.

Presented in a nontechnical fashion, at both the population-genetic and molecular-genetic levels, this book offers a unifying explanatory framework for how the peculiar architectural diversity of eukaryotic genomes and genes came to arise. Under Lynch's hypothesis, the genome-wide repatterning of eukaryotic gene structure, which resulted primarily from nonadaptive processes, provided an entirely novel resource from which natural selection could secondarily build new forms of organismal complexity.

Genres: Science, Biology, Genetics, Evolution, Nonfiction

340 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2007

Reviews

[Gabriel Thornes]

I’ll review this properly when I have time. It’s unbelievably good.

[Michael Weaver]

This book advocates using population genetics to understand genomes and tries to answer the origins of the emergence of the eukaryotic genetic structure and address other issues such as how a DNA-based genome evolved from RNA. Lynch argues to build from the notion of the mobile gene element classes, and their role in the genome evolution, as the basis for the organization of the human genome. Since so much is still unknown and is still theoretical, this book will definitely give those n either side of the aisle topics for lively debate.

[Elizabeth]

As recommended by Eugene Koonin during a seminar hosted by the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics entitled "The origin and nature of the major innovations of eukaryogenesis".

[Bastian Greshake Tzovaras]

Good starting point if you're new to the topic to genomics