Predicting Ecosystem Metaphenome from Community Metagenome: A Grand
Challenge for Environmental Biology
Abstract
Elucidating how an organism’s characteristics emerge from its DNA
sequence has been one of the great triumphs of biology. This triumph has
cumulated in sophisticated computational models that successfully
predict how an organism’s detailed phenotype emerges from its specific
genotype. Inspired by that effort’s vision and empowered by its
methodologies, this Viewpoint describes a grand challenge to predict the
biotic characteristics of an ecosystem, its metaphenome, from nucleic
acid sequences of all the species in its community, its metagenome.
Meeting this challenge would integrate rapidly advancing abilities of
environmental nucleic acids (eDNA and eRNA) to identify organisms, their
ecological interactions, and their evolutionary relationships with
advances in mechanistic models of complex ecosystems. Addressing the
challenge aims to help integrate ecology and evolutionary biology into a
more unified and successfully predictive science that can better help
describe and manage ecosystems and the services they provide to
humanity.