c © Indian Academy of Sciences BOOK REVIEW The genome — it’s as simple as that! The Origins of Genome Architecture

Abstract

In the era of an ever growing variety of different ’-omics ’ (ge-nomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, to name a few), we are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of accumulating data. The records from GenBank show a dou-bling of deposited base pairs every 18 months, and for whole genome sequences the time for doubling of information may be even shorter. Handling of these enormous data sets pro-duced by whole genome sequencing or large scale gene ex-pression studies is increasingly complicated, and it is very difficult to manage the analysis without the help of ever more sophisticated bioinformatics approaches. However, Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Indiana, explains how to tackle even ba-sic questions about the complex architecture of genomes us-ing the principles of population genetics in his latest book The Origins of Genome Architecture. The history of this book dates back to 2003, when Lynch published a well re-ceived paper about the origins of genome complexity (Lynch and Conery 2003). In that paper, Lynch and Conery (2003) showed for the first time that the huge differences in genome organization that manifest in the massive range of genome size differences (average bacteria 0.5–10 Mb, average ani-mals 100–100,000 Mb), may be explained without the need for arguments involving selection and adaptation. This is-sue has been the starting point for a new controversy, as seen in responses to that paper (Vinogradov 2004; Daubin and Moran 2004). Actually, this controversy is not really a new one, as it is just another expression of the old debate between selectionists and neutralists. Lynch shows in that paper, as well as in a number of subsequent papers (Lync