Mammalogy in Japan in the era of next-generation sequencing: introduction for beginners

Abstract

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a novel, massive, parallel DNA sequencing technology developed in the latter half of the 2000s. Thanks to the massive parallel sequencing of multiple samples and production of unprecedented data abundance, it has great potential to contribute to mammalogy, especially to evolution, ecology, and taxonomy of mammals. Despite being a decade since the development of this technology, it has not fully been applied to the research of Japanese mammalogists. In this paper, by briefly describing several NGS methods available to study wild mammals as well as introducing recent applications and progress, we show that now is the time to broadly expand Japanese mammalogy with this breakthrough in genome technology not only in the field of basic science, but also applied science, including the conservation and management of wild mammals.