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Genotyping‐by‐sequencing in ecological and conservation genomics

The fields of ecological and conservation genetics have developed greatly in recent decades through the use of molecular markers to investigate organisms in their natural habitat and to evaluate the effect of anthropogenic disturbances. However, many of these studies have been limited to narrow regions of the genome, allowing for limited inferences but making it difficult to generalize about the organisms and their evolutionary history. Tremendous advances in sequencing technology over the last decade (i.e. next-generation sequencing; NGS) have led to the ability to sample the genome much more densely and to observe the patterns of genetic variation that result from the full range of evolutionary processes acting across the genome (Allendorf et al. 2010; Stapley et al. 2010; Li et al. 2012). These studies are transforming molecular ecology by making many long-standing questions much more easily accessible in almost any organism. 
 
When studying the genetics of wild populations, it is desirable to samples tens, hundreds or even thousands of individuals. While it is now possible to sequence whole genomes for tens of individuals with small genome sizes, the sequencing of hundreds of individuals with large genomes remains prohibitively expensive, particularly where the genome sequence is unknown. Further, for the purpose of many studies, complete genomic sequence data for all individuals would be unnecessary and simply inflate the computational and bioinformatic costs. A major recent advance has been the development of genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approaches that allow a targeted fraction of the genome (a reduced representation library) to be sequenced with next-generation technology rather than the entire genome, even in species with little or no previous genomic information and large genomes. The subset of the genome to be sequenced in these GBS approaches may be targeted using restriction enzymes or capture probes or by sequencing the transcriptome (reviewed in Davey et al. 2011). In the future, as sequencing technology and computational and bioinformatic methods develop further, whole-genome resequencing may become the predominant method for ecological and conservation genomics. Currently, reduced representation approaches offer the ability to not only discover genetic variants such as SNPs but also genotype individuals at these newly discovered loci in the same data. 
 
This special issue on ‘Genotyping-by-Sequencing in Ecological and Conservation Genomics’ represents a diverse set of empirical and theoretical studies that demonstrate both the utility and some of the challenges of GBS in ecological and conservation genomics. The empirical studies include demonstrations of the utility of GBS for population genomics and association mapping, as well as the development of genomic resources (i.e. large SNP data sets) for target species. The studies also illustrate some of the differences between GBS methods, in particular, aligning paired-end reads to achieve longer consensus sequences in contrast to single-end reads with shorter alignments, and double-digest versus sonication methods to fragment DNA. In addition, several papers describe advanced data pipelines for handling GBS-related sequence data and critically evaluate best practices for GBS methods and potential biases and novel features associated with GBS data. Overall, this compilation of papers emphasizes that GBS has been quickly adopted by the scientific community and is expected to become a common tool for studies in molecular ecology.