Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
5. CONCLUSION
Metamorphosis is a very common process which marks the transition
between embryonic and adult life stages. Not only does it correspond to an
ecological transition, in that the ecological niche often differs between the
larva and the young adult, it also sets deep anatomical, physiological, cellular,
and molecular changes. As such, metamorphosis is a deep, fundamental, and
ancient biological process.
The problem of studying amphibian metamorphosis is that amphibian
genomes are often polyploids, which adds extra levels of genetic redundancy
and complexity, and limits to the tools which can be used to characterize
the molecular mechanisms of metamorphosis. In this regard, the diploid
X. tropicalis
presents many advantages. Not surprisingly, at the beginning
of genome sequencing, the scientific community quickly committed itself
to sequence
X. tropicalis
genome and produced functional genomic re-
sources. These were instrumental for the development of our current per-
ception of the molecular mechanisms of
X. tropicalis
metamorphosis.
The recent breakthroughs in sequencing technologies push once again
the scale and the precision of our molecular toolkits a step further. It is
now possible to describe with exquisite details the genome-wide remodeling
of transcriptional programs. Even better, such projects that used to require
the combined workforce of one to several research institutes can now be
carried out by a single lab. The promises of the molecular dissection of
amphibian metamorphosis are enormous. The downside of it is that the cur-
rent state of the
X. tropicalis
genome assembly and annotation does not reach
the standard needed to make use of the full power of these technologies. It is
thus important to revisit and update the
X. tropicalis
genomic resources.
The sequencing throughput has increased by three orders of magnitude
in the past few years, posing many computing constraints: storage disks space
is quickly saturated by the flood of sequencing data (because the advances of
hard drive technologies is much slower than the progresses of sequencing
throughput), large-scale analysis and processing often require large com-
puting clusters (with their own constraints on dedicated facilities, power
consumption, etc.), and data processing through large and complex bioin-
formatic pipeline. Theses weaknesses are counterbalanced (in part) by the
progress made in software engineering with new and efficient data types,
optimized database systems, and computing algorithms.
