Macrogenetics: A New Era of Biology With Big Data

Thanks to staggeringly large, high-resolution data sets, biologists can understand genetic diversity patterns across scales never before possible.

Scientists can now look at genetic patterns across large scales (Image Credit: Public Domain)

Since it’s beginning in the 1920s, the field of population genetics has had a data problem. The field’s purpose has always been to study the changes and flow of genes across time, location, and taxa, and to identify the responsible evolutionary forces, although doing so has been problematic up until recently thanks to the advent of big data.

In the early years, founders Wright, Haldane, and Fischer had no way to analyze actual genes on a molecular level, meaning their work was purely theoretical. For example, Fischer’s 1930 The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, one of the field’s seminal works, successfully combined Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s theory of natural selection-a major stepping stone-although it didn’t offer any real-world data. It wasn’t until decades later that the field evolved due to advancements like when Watson and Crick used X-ray Crystallography to discern DNA’s double helix structure and its molecular interactions in 1953. This opened the door for the invention of various molecular analysis techniques, rocketing the field forward, as data could be collected and…