David Houle from the Dept. of Biological Science, Florida State University, and currently on sabbatical at the University of Oslo, will give a talk on Thursday May 20th at 12.15 at UMB, Dept. of Animal & Aquacultural Sciences, room H185.
The genotype-phenotype map is the total set of processes through which genomes shape phenotypes. Understanding this map is critical to progress in biology, medicine and agriculture. The causation of key biological phenomena such as natural selection and disease takes place in a continuous phenotype space whose relationship to genomes is only dimly grasped. Direct study of genotypes with minimal reference to phenotypes is clearly insufficient to elucidate these phenomena. Phenomics, the comprehensive study of phenotypes, is therefore essential to understanding biology. The dimensionality of phenotypic data is often extremely high, suggesting that attempts to characterize phenotypes with a few key measurements are unlikely to be sufficient. On the other hand, once phenotypic data are obtained, causation can turn out to be unexpectedly simple. Phenotypic data can be informative about the past history of selection, and unexpectedly predictive of long-term evolution. Comprehensive efforts to increase the throughput and range of phenotyping are an urgent priority. I describe a systematic approach to the study of quantitative genotypic effects on multivariate phenotypes.
