Vision Statement
2025 SMBE meeting in Beijing – Looking forward to the next decade
At the upcoming SMBE annual meeting in Beijing, in addition to traditional topics, there will be a strong emphasis on emerging themes. This commitment to expanding our horizons echoes the early days of Molecular Biology and Evolution in the 1980s, a time when DNA sequencing was considered a luxury, even in the most advanced molecular biology institutions. It was the foresight of Masatoshi Nei and Walter Fitch that the future would be brighter for evolutionists. Indeed, the genomic era arrived at the turn of the century.
Nevertheless, despite the enormous growth, we have not gained the insight we wished for by unleashing a deluge of DNA and RNA sequences. In the early days of genomics, NIH (USA) called a series of meetings seeking expert opinions on sequencing chimpanzee genomes. Many voiced the optimism that, with the chimpanzee genome sequenced, we will know the origin of human intelligence, upright walking, neotenic development and so on. It has turned out that the static DNA sequences are not enough to yield such insights.
To take the next step as Nei and Fitch had taken, we have to be able to manipulate the genomes in large scale and, thus, integrate evolutionary biology with synthetic biology. The latter is the extension of what used to be referred to as Molecular Biological Engineering (MBE, for short). Furthermore, when an engineering project is launched nowadays, AI (artificial intelligence) is often employed for obvious reasons. Therefore, we call for proposals in the various interfaces of “Evolution, synthetic biology and AI”.
There are other areas of research that may complete the systems of evolutionary biology but are under-cultivated by MBE. For example, in most systems we study, the sample size is one, such as the single lineage leading to modern humans. While laboratory evolution studies may remedy this inherent constraint somewhat, the evolution of somatic cells (sometimes leading to cancer) is naturally massively repeated. By harvesting the results of thousands (or even millions) of repeated events, it may be possible to fully understand the evolutionary process. Such systems can be easily subjected to manipulation. However, somatic cell evolution is often excluded by evolutionary biologists for its being too closely aligned with medicine. While it is understandable, maybe we should consider the unique characteristics of somatic cell evolution. They include phenotypic plasticity, mutation rate evolution and the unexpected working of positive vs. negative selection. In this view, somatic cell evolution is conceptually a complete evolutionary system that is rarely attained in organismal evolution.
Another criticism of evolutionary studies is that we can only study the outcome, but not the process. That may be why the ancient DNA studies deserve a Nobel. The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during COVID-19 shows how an evolutionary process could be completely recorded. However, there are enormous confusions about COVID-19 evolution partly because the necessary evolutionary theories have not been developed. For example, genetic drift in viral evolution cannot be rigorously done as it happens in two tiers – within and between hosts. While quite a few have put in substantial efforts into COVID-19, greater investments in viral evolution from the MBE community will be necessary. For example, no evolutionists would conclude the origin of a species in one fixed location by studying only samples from that location. But that is precisely what the virology publications have concluded.
In short, we hope the SMBE meeting in Beijing will see the greater expansion of evolution studies, much like what happened by the launch of MBE itself 40 years ago.
Chung-I Wu
On behalf of the Local Organization Committee
