I would like to collect some pros and cons for a review/opinion paper and waiting for some comments on why it would be useful to have complete chloroplast genomes sequenced for some economically important plant species and for its wild relatives.
- What do you think, why this would be useful or would this be useful at all?
- From an evolutionary point of view, how this data could be used for research?
- How about sequencing plastome of every member of an entire genus or even more an entire family?
My particular interest right now is interspecific hybridization. I don't have a hypothesis formed, but I'm trying to incorporate the perenniality of a wild relative with what is typically an annual C4 grass. Biomass accumulation is one of the goals, so a plastome study would help with capturing a CHO metabolism story, which is something useful to me, as more of an ecophysiologist/breeder.
I don't know with the specific cross that I am making how conserved the plastome will be. I'm in the Sorghum genus, with well-matched species (2n = 2x). If differences exist, it would be at a relatively fine level of detail that might allow interesting patterns to be observed (at gene expression level).
Last thought -- getting a strong data set of a plant family would really make a difference in the power of the data from an evolutionary POV, I think. It's like having a multi-level perspective, like mapping nearest neighbor patterns, and then zooming out by a scaling factor. Be a good use of computational tools and pattern recog software.
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