A primer on genomology

Comparative Genomics: Empirical and Analytical Approaches to Gene Order Dynamics, Map Alignment and the Evolution of Gene Familiesedited by David Sankoff and Joseph H. NadeauKluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.$240.00 hbk/$79.00 pbk (557 pages)ISBN 0 7923 6583 6There can be little doubt that the explosion of data that characterizes the genomics era has had a profound affect on biological research. The generation and interpretation of such copious amounts of data requires the use of novel experimental approaches and analytical frameworks. However, the question remains as to whether genomics entails anything more than the study of many genes. In other words, does genomics represent a unique endeavor distinct from the field of genetics?Editors David Sankoff and Joseph H. Nadeau provide an unequivocally affirmative answer to this question with their compilation Comparative Genomics: Empirical and Analytical Approaches to Gene Order Dynamics, Map Alignment and the Evolution of Gene Families. The emphasis of this collection of papers is placed squarely on the global study of gene order. The editors stress that the availability of complete genome sequences is crucial for such studies because gene order dynamics can only be assessed meaningfully at the genomics level. Furthermore, the analytical techniques that underlie the comparative study of gene order involve more than a mere scaling up of methods previously employed for the analysis of gene sequences. Thus, this book is distinguished by its presentation of a unique higher-order perspective afforded by comparative studies of whole genomes.Comparative Genomics is the first volume in Kluwer's Computational Biology Series. The manuscripts that make up the book were originally presented at the Gene Order Dynamics, Comparative Maps and Multigene Families workshop (Quebec, Canada; September 2000). The editors have brought together a diverse group of scientists representing a number of different disciplines within the fields of biology, mathematics and statistics. Their combined efforts provided 38 contributions, grouped into seven sections. The book opens with a section on mechanisms that focuses on genome rearrangement. The sections on combinatorial algorithms and statistics cover a number of analytical techniques and make up the most theoretical sections of the book. Chapters dedicated to reports on comparisons of prokaryotic, eukaryotic and organellar genomes are each given their own sections. The final section of the book deals with gene and genome duplication and multi-gene families.I can offer only mild criticisms of this work. In some cases, the scope of the book is not quite matched by its depth. There are a number of fairly short chapters, and the material covered in any given chapter is not always presented in great detail. In addition, given the completion of numerous prokaryotic genome sequences, the section dedicated explicitly to the comparison of these genomes suffers slightly from a paucity of chapters. The occasional lack of depth probably reflects a necessary trade-off resulting from the editors’ inclusion of chapters covering such a diverse set of subjects. Unfortunately, readers using the book as a reference source might find that a particular subject of interest is not afforded as comprehensive a treatment as could be desired. However, many of the chapters are, in fact, quite well developed, and in any case the book is a good starting point for research in comparative genomics.Comparative Genomics is an ambitious synthesis of numerous disparate approaches to studying questions of gene order dynamics, comparative mapping and gene duplication. The combination of empirical and theoretical studies presented here provides a rich resource for investigators interested in taking a holistic approach to the study of genomes. In the foreword to this volume, W. Ford Doolittle coins the term ‘genomology’ to describe the science of whole genomes. Whether or not his term takes hold, the collection of papers presented by Sankoff and Nadeau should serve nicely as a both a resource and a primer for the nascent field of whole genome science.