High-throughput SNPs for all: genotyping-in-thousands

Understanding the genetic structure of species is essential for conservation. It is only with this information that managers, academics, user groups and land-use planners can understand the spatial scale of migration and local adaptation, source-sink dynamics and effective population size. Such information is essential for a multitude of applications including delineating management units, balancing management priorities, discovering cryptic species and implementing captive breeding programmes. Species can range from locally adapted by hundreds of metres (Pavey et al. ) to complete species panmixia (Côté et al. ). Even more remarkable is that this essential information can be obtained without fully sequenced or annotated genomes, but from mere (putatively) nonfunctional variants. First with allozymes, then microsatellites and now SNPs, this neutral genetic variation carries a wealth of information about migration and drift. For many of us, it may be somewhat difficult to remember our understanding of species conservation before the widespread usage of these useful tools. However most species on earth have yet to give us that 'peek under the curtain'. With the current diversity on earth estimated to be nearly 9 million species (Mora et al. ), we have a long way to go for a comprehensive meta-phylogeographic understanding. A method presented in this issue by Campbell and colleagues (Campbell et al. ) is a tool that will accelerate the pace in this area. Genotyping-in-thousands (GT-seq) leverages recent advancements in sequencing technology to save many hours and dollars over previous methods to generate this important neutral genetic information.