Earth BioGenome Project: Sequencing life for the future of life

Abstract

Increasing our understanding of Earth's biodiversity and responsibly stewarding its resources are among the most crucial scientific and social challenges of the new millennium. These challenges require fundamental new knowledge of the organization, evolution, functions, and interactions among millions of the planet's organisms. Herein, we present a perspective on the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a moonshot for biology that aims to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth's eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of 10 years. The outcomes of the EBP will inform a broad range of major issues facing humanity, such as the impact of climate change on biodiversity, the conservation of endangered species and ecosystems, and the preservation and enhancement of ecosystem services. We describe hurdles that the project faces, including data-sharing policies that ensure a permanent, freely available resource for future scientific discovery while respecting access and benefit sharing guidelines of the Nagoya Protocol. We also describe scientific and organizational challenges in executing such an ambitious project, and the structure proposed to achieve the project's goals. The far-reaching potential benefits of creating an open digital repository of genomic information for life on Earth can be realized only by a coordinated international effort.

Comparative genomics of 10 newCaenorhabditisspecies

“…Complete sequencing of all taxa on earth has been proposed (Lewin et al. ), and active support should be offered to taxonomists to add their new species to this global effort.…”

DeviaTE: Assembly‐free analysis and visualization of mobile genetic element composition

“…As high quality genome assemblies are currently solely available for 25 eukaryotic species (Lewin et al., ), assembly‐free methods to quantify TEs, such as DeviaTE, may be useful for many different reasearch questions in model and non‐model organisms alike. DeviaTE, however, requires consensus sequences of TEs.…”

Promises and pitfalls of using high‐throughput sequencing for diet analysis

“…In this regard, numerous reference databases are being developed (including the original barcoding database BOLD—the Barcode Of Life, Ratnasingham & Hebert, ) as well as more recent initiatives that aim to supplement partial organelle marker sequences with whole organelle genomes (e.g., PhyloAlps, www.phyloalps.org and NorBOL, www.norbol.org, Ekrem et al, ) and even low coverage nuclear genomic data (e.g., DNAmark, www.dnamark.ku.dk). Furthermore, initiatives with reference data consisting of whole eukaryotic genomes have started to emerge (Grigoriev et al, ; Koepfli et al, ; Lewin et al, ; Matasci et al, ). It is important to note, however, that when the prey taxa are poorly characterized in reference databases, a major advantage of sequencing‐based approaches is that differentiation in diet can be assessed based on Operational Taxonomic Units, OTUs (Blaxter et al, ).…”