Associated organisationsEarlham Institute · European Bioinformatics Institute · Kew Royal Botanic Gardens · Marine Biological Association · Natural History Museum · Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh · University of Cambridge · University of Edinburgh · University of Exeter · University of Oxford · Wellcome Sanger InstituteEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£9.4M
PeriodOct 2019 — Mar 2022
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
The Darwin Tree of Life project will sequence the DNA of all 60,000 species of plants, animals, and fungi living in the British Isles. This matters because we lack a complete genetic catalogue for even a fraction of Earth's species. Without it, biologists cannot fully understand how life evolved, what genes are available for biotechnology, or how ecosystems are changing under climate and pollution stress. Current knowledge is patchy—scientists often work with genetic data from only a handful of model organisms. If successful, the project will produce reference-quality genomes for 2,000 species in its first phase, with a pipeline capable of scaling to the rest. This is primarily fundamental science: it creates a permanent inventory of life and a tool for future discovery. The data will underpin bioscience for decades, much as the Human Genome Project transformed medicine. Practical applications could emerge from the catalogue of eukaryotic gene toolkits—enzymes for industry, markers for environmental monitoring, or insights into disease resistance in wild species—but the core value is a systematic, open-access map of genetic diversity that does not yet exist.
View original technical description
Life has evolved from a single origin to generate >1.5 million eukaryotic species. Sequencing all species will provide an inventory of life, transform understanding of evolution, catalogue eukaryotic gene toolkits for biology and biotechnology, and enable monitoring of ecosystems under increasing stress. The Darwin Tree of Life (DToL) is a new initiative that will exploit long read technologies to sequence all 60000 species in the British Isles and play a leading role in the Earth BioGenome Project. This data resource will underpin bioscience for the coming century. We are a consortium of partners who will build and prove an end-to-end pipeline of sample collection, sequencing, genome assembly, annotation and data dissemination that can deliver this visionary project. We will: - Establish sample collection networks (to collect, record and voucher ~8000 species) - Put in place large-scale sequencing and analytic processes (including for single cells and small-bodied taxa) - Generate reference quality, deeply annotated genome assemblies for 2000 species - Develop portals to disseminate the reference genomes, empowering wider scientific communities to embrace genomics in their future endeavours - Share expertise in protocol development and informatics among the Darwin Tree of Life partners to strengthen institutional capacities across the consortium, and with the global EBP.
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