Natural Variation

Evolution is a driving process that takes in information as an input (typically genetically inheritable information) and spits out deviants or variants of this genetic template. Natural variation among species is the results of continual evolution. Natural variation occurs at all hierarchical levels from kingdoms to families to genus to species. For example, the organism used as a model species in the plant biology world is Arabidopsis. Since the early 21^st century the Arabidopsis community has undertaken the laborious task known as the one thousand and one genome project. In other words, they are sequencing the genome of every Arabidopsis ecotype. We use three of these fully sequenced ecotypes in our lab for various reasons – simply, some are better for certain assays than others. This is an example of natural variation at a large, topical level. Let us consider natural variation at the molecular level. Just as whole genomes differ slightly from their common ancestor, the family of proteins I work on has a large region of homology (~70%) with one another. The landscape at the sequence level, protein and DNA alike follow a trend of each other. It is unknown whether or not these variations account for evolutionarily induced new functions of the proteins themselves. However, the answers are being slowly uncovered.