"Why not chain everything?" A plan to decode all the complex species of the planet

An ambitious effort to sequence the genome of all complex organisms on Earth was officially launched on November 1 in London.

"Variation is the source of all genetic knowledge," said Jenny Graves, project member and evolution geneticist, from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. "The more variations you have, the better, so why not chain everything together?"

The Earth BioGenome project aims to sequence the genomes of about 1.5 million animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species known as eukaryotes worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is expected to cost $ 4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of this money has been committed so far.

As part of this effort, scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, announced plans to spend up to 50 million pounds (US $ 65 million) over 8 years to sequence genomes of the eukaryotic species in the United Kingdom. about 66,000.

Wellcome Sanger's support – coming from its overall budget – is one of the most important commitments made to date.

The total amount of financial commitments taken to date is approximately $ 200 million, according to estimates by Harris Lewin, a University of California evolution biologist, Davis, who chairs the project's working group. Earth BioGenome. This is one-third of the estimated cost for Phase 1 of the project goal of sequencing the genome of at least one species in each of the 9,000 families of known eukaryotic organisms. He hopes to raise the rest of the funding within a year.

Collaborative chaos

The project includes more than a dozen existing sequencing projects focused, for example, on specific branches of the tree of life – such as birds, insects and plants – or on biodiversity in the world. a given country, such as the UK effort, officially. called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.

"We do not need a single project on the genome to govern them all," says Lewin. On the contrary, the effort reason to be, he says, is to ensure that ongoing efforts to sequence biodiversity are standardized.

"When you go to communities, it's chaos, it's anarchy," says Lewin. "If you come to the end and everyone does their own thing, it will be the Tower of Babylon at the end."

At the London meeting, participants developed guidelines for collecting, sequencing, storing and sharing samples. Such standards are essential to making genomes useful to all scientists, not just those in a particular field, says Lewin.

As an umbrella organization, the Earth BioGenome project is also helpful in ensuring that sequencing efforts cover all branches of life, not just those that have previously attracted the attention of scientists, according to those who participated.