Olimpia
Biologist & Ecologist
Dekuscrub, Your info on taxonomy leaves a lot to be desired.
I just did mtDNA sequencing of the South-Eastern beach mouse for a conservation genetics class and it really as expensive as you'd think. Like someone said, the lab can do a sample for under $100, and it takes about 20 minutes per sample on an older machine. So if you're doing a tray of test tube samples, you can leave it overnight and come back to find all your samples sequenced.
By looking at mtDNA and looking specifically at microsatellites you can tell a great deal of info on an individual. As an example, you can look specifically at non-lethal mutations in the loci (the little things, the ones that aren't really hurting so they are under no selective pressure one way or another, so they will "ride" unnoticed and unchanged in the genome for a looong time) and it can tell you how closely two populations are related by how many of these mutations the individuals share. So if two populations share, say 10 mutations, and a third population shares only 4, you know that pops 1 and 2 are much more closely related than pop 1 and 3 are. You can also do calculations that tell you how long ago two populations diverged from each other.
There is NO way that the genome can't tell you more about the history and relatives of a species than morphology can. That worked when we didn't have any advanced techniques but in this day and age it's vital to know the ins and outs of species if we want to work with them in any capacity. Sequencing DNA is the most efficient way of doing this.
I just did mtDNA sequencing of the South-Eastern beach mouse for a conservation genetics class and it really as expensive as you'd think. Like someone said, the lab can do a sample for under $100, and it takes about 20 minutes per sample on an older machine. So if you're doing a tray of test tube samples, you can leave it overnight and come back to find all your samples sequenced.
By looking at mtDNA and looking specifically at microsatellites you can tell a great deal of info on an individual. As an example, you can look specifically at non-lethal mutations in the loci (the little things, the ones that aren't really hurting so they are under no selective pressure one way or another, so they will "ride" unnoticed and unchanged in the genome for a looong time) and it can tell you how closely two populations are related by how many of these mutations the individuals share. So if two populations share, say 10 mutations, and a third population shares only 4, you know that pops 1 and 2 are much more closely related than pop 1 and 3 are. You can also do calculations that tell you how long ago two populations diverged from each other.
There is NO way that the genome can't tell you more about the history and relatives of a species than morphology can. That worked when we didn't have any advanced techniques but in this day and age it's vital to know the ins and outs of species if we want to work with them in any capacity. Sequencing DNA is the most efficient way of doing this.
