植物分子群体遗传学研究动态

Recent progress in plant molecular population genetics

分子群体遗传学是当代进化生物学研究的支柱学科,也是遗传育种和关于遗传关联作图和连锁分析的基础理论学科。分子群体遗传学是在经典群体遗传的基础上发展起来的,它利用大分子主要是DNA序列的变异式样来研究群体的遗传结构及引起群体遗传变化的因素与群体遗传结构的关系,从而使得遗传学家能够从数量上精确地推知群体的进化演变,不仅克服了经典的群体遗传学通常只能研究群体遗传结构短期变化的局限性,而且可检验以往关于长期进化或遗传系统稳定性推论的可靠程度。同时,对群体中分子序列变异式样的研究也使人们开始重新审视达尔文的以"自然选择"为核心的进化学说。到目前为止,分子群体遗传学已经取得长足的发展,阐明了许多重要的科学问题,如一些重要农作物的DNA多态性式样、连锁不平衡水平及其影响因素、种群的变迁历史、基因进化的遗传学动力等,更为重要的是,在分子群体遗传学基础上建立起来的新兴的学科如分子系统地理学等也得到了迅速的发展。文中综述了植物分子群体遗传研究的内容及最新成果。

Molecular population genetics is not only one of the most important subjects of evolutionary biology, but also the basics subject of breeding, association mapping, and linkage analysis. Molecular population genetics has been developed from the classical population genetics aiming at studying population genetic structure and the factors that affect the population genetic structure by investigating the variation of DNA sequences. Therefore, population evolving history can be deduced accurately and quantitatively for evaluating the former conclusions about long-term evolution and the stability of genetic systems. Thus, molecular population genetics can avoid the shortcomings of classical population genetics, i.e. limiting to deduce the short evolving history of a population. Moreover, understanding of molecular variation patterns leads to further evaluation of the evolution theory, which is based on ＂Natural Selection＂ and introduced by Darwin. Molecular population genetics has made great progress and revealed many important scientific issues, such as the pattern of DNA polymorphism, the level of linkage disequilibrium, demographical history, and the genetic forces affecting gene evolvement Furthermore, new research areas have been developed from molecular population genetics and become the hot fields, such as molecular phylogeography. In this review, we summarized studies and progresses of plant molecular population genetics.