Why is it needed to develop system biology initiatives such as ENCODE on non-model organisms? The next generation genomics era includes non-model organisms Genetics, and now genomics, applied to model organisms continues to be hugely successful at identifying and characterizing DNA elements and mechanisms involved in major biological processes, such as the regulation of development, cell cycle and cell signaling. However, the number of organisms that are supported by large research communities applying genetic approaches is limited. Organisms such as Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Danio rerio or Mus musculus are elected as "super model organisms" mainly based on their important yet curious biological attributes and many technical advantages. Drosophila emerged as the premier study system for genetics because of naturally occurring visible mutants, which led to the discovery of chromosomal heredity, while Caenorhabditis was selected as the main organism for studies of cell differentiation and development because its cell lineage is nearly invariant from egg to adult. All are ideal targets for genetics as they are easily reared or cultivated in the lab in order to systematically generate the necessary mutants or genetic crosses. Model organisms in genetics share common traits including short life cycles and a high fertility rate. They are robust cosmopolitan resources of laboratory experiments. The trade-off to using model organisms is that they are often not "typical" and do not reflect the biology of their close relatives or even the wide diversity of living mechanisms. They also display only a fraction of the traits found in the biosphere, often limited to observations made in the laboratory. Yeast, for example, does not form multicellular hyphae and A. thaliana has no known root symbioses. C. elegans and D. melanogaster are not pathogens or pests and the zebra fish is certainly not adapted to living in marine environments. Similarly, rats and mice, typically used as models in biomedical research, are nocturnal not diurnal. Even commonly used human cell lines, such as HeLa cells show strong rDNA rearrangements [1, 2] . It is perhaps no surprise that over 50% of many genomes of model species are still without experimentally determined functional annotations when many traits are conditionally expressed in varying and natural environments. In addition to the lack of phenotypic representation in model organisms, it is worth noting that many species that either participate in anchoring ecosystems (e.g. keystone species) or are responsible for many health, agronomical and environmental challenges (e.g. human and animal disease causing agents, plant pests, invasive species) are not model organisms. Fortunately, the recent advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) coupled with other high-throughput and high-definition analyses of the cellular organic molecules (compound screening, mass spectrometry) provide the opportunity to rapidly generate genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic resources for potentially any organism and their populations. More than 1,300 eukaryotic genome sequences are archived in NCBI as of April 2014 (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ genomes/GENOME_REPORTS/). Clearly, the number of genome data submissions has steadily risen over recent years, notably between 2009 and 2010 (Figure 1) . This trend will persist and accelerate as the cost of sequencing continues to plummet. However, many genome sequencing projects concern species that are closely related to already well-characterized model organisms; of 2,401 listed project at NCBI, only 991
Several things in the world are naturally encoded, for example, genomes of animals REF .
Genomic data integration for ecological and evolutionary traits in non-model organisms
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