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Panel 12 – science bio/geo
2.6 Evaluation of future plans
Overall, most of the future plans are presented at a general level, and it is
not easy to evaluate them.
The Center for Genomic Ecology and the associated Research School
represent very good initiative. The center will serve many groups in the
department. It will provide possibilities for e.g. gene expression studies.
Importantly, there is also bioinformatics expertise for genome annotation or
comparative genomics etc.
Most genomic centers would be busy thinking about how best to take advantage
of the high throughput sequencing applications to tackle important
questions with the new tools. The plans here are at a very general level, and
do not seem to engage very much in sequence level methods for within
population studies (as also suggested by the moderate numbers of sequences
analysed at the center). If the plan is to get such analyses done outside the
university, one would still have expected to see this discussed.
It seems that Lund ecology lacks in depth expertise in analysis of population
genetics of sequence variation, or of population genomic studies. Many of
the groups list topics such as speciation and adaptation at the molecular
level. For these topics, analysis of sequence variation is a very powerful tool,
naturally combined to other approaches.
Experimental evolution. The plans for are so vaguely describe it is not possible
to really evaluate them.
Plant Ecology and Systematics. The studies on gene diversity and habitats
will aim at moving to a more explicitly genomics based approach. It is clear
that this approach will demand much focus, in terms of species and systems.
Since quite much work is already going on internationally in this area, the
groups need to consider where their special strength is. The plans to expand
studies related to the recent findings of sperm transfer in mosses are also
quite vague.
Chemical ecology and toxicology. The future plans of this division are a
mixture of rather vaguely stated general issues (speciation), but then go on to
discuss technical issues such as heterologous expression of genes. Speciation
studies are widely conducted, it is not clear what the specific Lund contribution
will be here. The section on soil ecology also gives just very general description.
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