Novogene Blog - Darwin Tree of Life Project
The Wellcome Sanger Institute has recently announced the gargantuan plan of sequencing the genomes of all species that inhabit Britain and Ireland, an estimated 70,000, as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project.
The sequencing of the first human genome took a decade, but the current plan is hardly comparable, with the view of sequencing 70,000 genomes in the same timeframe, with some of the genomes in question up to 30 times larger than the human genome. The first animal genome ever sequenced was that of Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm that has since become a crucial model organism within genetic research. That achievement led to the development of the technology necessary for the Human Genome Project, and now, almost a decade later, it is time to turn efforts to the vast array of species within the British Isles in the name of conservation, food security, resource sustainability, and the environment.
The sequencing strategy of this project will contain two steps – long-read sequencing carried out on PacBio and Oxford Nanopore sequencers and Hi-C, or chromatin conformation capture, which will assist in the linking of distant parts of the genomes to each other.
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