The metabolic adaptation in wild vertebrates via omics approaches

Abstract

Metabolism is the basis for sustaining life and essential to the adaptive evolution of organisms. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, genetic mechanisms of adaptive evolution, including metabolic adaptation, have been extensively resolved by omics approaches, but a deep understanding of genetic and epigenetic metabolic adaptation is still lacking. Exploring metabolic adaptations from genetic and epigenetic perspectives in wild vertebrates is vital to understanding species evolution, especially for the early stages of adaptative evolution. Herein, we summarize the advances in our understanding of metabolic adaptations via omics approaches in wild vertebrates based on three types of cases: extreme environment, periodically changing environment, and changes of species characteristics. We conclude that the understanding of the formation of metabolic adaptations at the genetic level alone can well identify the adaptive genetic variation that has developed during evolution, but cannot resolve the potential impact of metabolic adaptations on the adaptative evolution in the future. Thus, it seems imperative to include epigenomics and metabolomics in the study of adaptation, and that in the future genomic and epigenetic data should be integrated to understand the formation of metabolic adaptation of wild vertebrate organisms.