The emerging field of phylogenomics is influencing both the amount and type of characters being brought to bear on long-standing problems in systematic biology. Moreover, the proliferation of sequence information from genome projects in concert with the development of new informatics tools is widening access to comparative data on retroelements to a broad cross section of investigators. Motivated by this, the Society of Systematic Biologists sponsored a symposium entitled "Genome Analysis and the Molecular Systematics of Retroelements," and the resulting papers illustrate this theme of new discoveries and cover three basic areas of research: (i) the taxonomic distribution and phylogenetic structure of families of retroelements; (II) the use of SINE and LINE insertions for phylogenetic inference; and (III) the informatics and classification of repetitive elements. Contributions of each article are briefly discussed in this context and particularly fruitful directions for future research illuminated by results of this symposium are reviewed.

中文翻译：

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探索 DNA 领域的前沿：“基因组分析和 Retroelements 的分子系统学”研讨会简介

系统基因组学这一新兴领域正在影响与系统生物学中长期存在的问题相关的特征的数量和类型。此外，随着新信息学工具的发展，来自基因组项目的序列信息的激增正在扩大对反转录元件的比较数据的访问范围，使广泛的研究人员能够获得更多的信息。受此启发，系统生物学家协会主办了一场题为“基因组分析和逆向元素分子系统学”的研讨会，由此产生的论文阐明了这一新发现的主题，涵盖了三个基本研究领域：(i) 分类学分布和系统发育逆向元素家族的结构；(II) 使用 SINE 和 LINE 插入进行系统发育推断；(III) 重复元素的信息学和分类。在此背景下简要讨论了每篇文章的贡献，并回顾了本次研讨会的结果所阐明的未来研究的特别富有成效的方向。