January 31st 2008

What is Comparative Functional Genomics?

Everyone will read two background papers

  1. The introduction to the symposium on Ecological Genomics that took place at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution held at the University of Toronto in May 2007 (Landry and Aubin-Horth, 2007)
  2. The review article that really kick-started the field of Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics in 2004 (Feder and Mitchell-Olds 2003).

Each student will find one research paper of personal interest.

The subject of your chosen papers will be the starting point for our conversation to begin to discuss the scope of the field and outline our general areas of interest for the remainder of the semester. You will not be expected to give a formal presentation on this paper but you will be expected to discuss the scientific merrit, the general approach and your personal interest in the questions addressed by this research.
The chosen papers will not necessarily be what you will present formally later in the semester. The purpose of this discussion is to familiarize ourselves with the breadth and depth of the field.

Feder ME, Mitchell-Olds T (2003) Evolutionary and ecological functional genomics. Nature Reviews Genetics 4(8): 651-657.
Landry CR, Aubin-Horth N (2007) Ecological annotation of genes and genomes through ecological genomics. Molecular Ecology 16: 4419-4421.