SGER: Population variation and environmental adaptation in all the genes of the purple sea urchin

海洋环境变化广泛地影响海洋生物和生态系统，设定物种范围的限制，并确定未来气候变化的可能影响。许多海洋物种在很大的地理范围内持续存在：例如，在64个主要由优势物种定义的大型海洋生态系统中，大多数跨越了至少20度的纬度，温带海洋生态系统的范围通常从亚热带到北温带水域。这些范围内的环境梯度相当大，因此生态系统中许多关键物种生活在空间可变的环境制度下。预计大多数海洋物种在这些范围内的高基因流将淹没对环境条件的严格适应。然而，这一假设从未在任何物种的大量特征或基因中得到严格的检验。研究者开发了一种方法来搜索受环境条件影响和适应环境条件的基因的基因组，以获得当前环境梯度如何影响生态系统中关键物种的人口、生活史和生态作用的完整图景，影响生物体，以及未来气候变化将如何影响生态系统。有了这个SGER，研究人员将测试他开发的一种新方法的实用性，该方法可以测量环境梯度对物种基因组的每个基因的影响。这一结果表明，一种简单的方法可以同时在成千上万个基因座上对个体进行快速遗传鉴定。研究者将使用紫海胆作为重点物种，因为它的基因组最近已经完成，并且它显示出有趣的种群结构模式，但我们描述的方法广泛适用于包括人类在内的任何物种。

Environmental change in the oceans broadly impacts marine organisms and ecosystems, setting the limits of species' ranges, and determining the likely impact of future climate alteration. Many marine species persist over large geographic ranges: for example, of the 64 Large Marine Ecosystems - defined largely by dominant species - most span at least 20 degrees of latitude, and temperate LMEs often range from subtropical to northern temperate waters. Environmental gradients across these ranges are considerable, and so many key species in ecosystems live under spatially variable environmental regimes. High gene flow across these ranges in most marine species is expected to swamp out tight adaptation to environmental conditions. However, this assumption has never been rigorously tested for large numbers of traits or genes within any species. The investigator has developed a method to search the genome for genes affected by and adapted to environmental conditions, in order to obtain a complete picture of the way current environmental gradients affect the demography, life histories, and ecological role of critical species within ecosystems, impact organisms, and how future climate change will affect ecosystems. With this SGER, the investigator will test the utility of a new method he has developed to measure the impact of environmental gradients on every gene of a species' genome. The results should demonstrate a simple approach to rapid genetic identification of individuals at tens of thousands of loci at the same time. The investigator will use the purple sea urchin as the focal species because its genome has recently been completed and it shows intriguing patterns of population structure, but the approach we describe is broadly applicable to any species including humans.