The first Human Genome Project involved scientists from 20 institutions in six countries, costed $ 3 billion over 13 years to complete the task. Advances in the genomic technologies over the past two decades have led to substantial reductions in the costs and turnaround time of sequencing a given genome. For example, a single human genome now can be finished with only $1,000 in a few days. The $100 mark could be reached a few years from now. In the past decade, many wildlife genomes have been enhanced by using quality, cost effective, and leading-edge techniques.
Conservation biologists apply population genomic approaches to address questions involve revealing the evolutionary history, population structure, effective population size, and genes responsible for local adaptation, health, behavior, and inbreeding depression to contribute effective conservation as well as management. Population genomics have become essential to conservation biology. In this lecture, we will go over some of the recent examples to introduce important concepts in population genomics and how we might integrate population genomics and wildlife conservation in providing valuable insight into the threatening processes that wildlife and their management in conservation.
