Fifty Years of Conservation Genetics: A Personal Perspective

I provide my personal account of the application of genetics to conservation. I began graduate school shortly after the first description of genetic variation in natural populations. The use of allozymes uncovered an unexpected amount of genetic variation in a wide variety of species. During this same period, Motoo Kimura proposed the Neutral Theory of Evolution. Understanding the adaptive significance of allozyme variation became the major focus of population genetics. The utility of population genetic data for conservation and management was questioned because if the observed patterns were determined primarily by selection, then they could not be used to estimate gene flow or genetic drift. The study of mitochondrial DNA next provided a different view of genetic variation by allowing the overlaying of genealogical information on the locations of sampled individuals (phylogeography). The introduction of microsatellites allowed the study of a large number of nuclear markers. The many loci and large number of alleles at microsatellites were valuable for detecting bottlenecks and identifying relationships of individuals. The use of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) next opened the door to genomic analysis that allowed sampling a mapped genome to detect forces affecting particular genomic regions instead of using a representative sample of loci. For example, using runs of homozygosity has revolutionised our understanding of the effects of inbreeding and the detection of inbreeding depression. Current techniques provide unprecedented power to study genetic variation in natural populations. Nevertheless, the application of this information requires a sound understanding of population genetics theory.