I just love it when a few people want to change the world, and this is exactly what could happen if the newly announced “Earth BioGenome Project” (EBP) is successful. This extremely ambitious project wants to sequence, catalog, and characterize the entire genome of all known eukaryotic species on Earth, and give everyone access to this huge amount of knowledge.
An image that shows the huge amount of diversity within the eukaryotic domain. Images by André Karwath, Hans Hillewaert, Aurora M. Nedelcu, Aaron Logan, Leif Stridvall, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), compilation by Vojtěch Dostál - posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
There are about 1.5 million known eukaryotes in the world, and so far, only 0.2 % of these have had their genome sequenced, which means that there is a whole lot of work to do. In addition to these 1.5 million known species, there is an estimated 10 to 15 million unknown species, and the project hope to be able to sequence a lot of these as well.
And for those who are not confident about what an eukaryote is; it’s any organism whose cells have a nucleus that is enclosed by a membrane. Most eukaryotes also have membrane-bound organelles, and tend to be multicellular (but not all of them are multicellular or have organelles). Any organism that is in the animal, plant or fungi kingdoms are eukaryotic, and only bacteria and archaea are not eukaryotes – these are instead called prokaryotic.
Anyway, let’s return to the Earth BioGenome Project! It seems just like a project that I like, because they want to make the data from the sequences available to anyone who needs it, which means that it can be the cornerstone for thousands of new scientific discoveries. This will allow researchers to compare the genome of several species with that of other species without having to actually collect and sequence the DNA, and they can instead just get the data from a database.
This means that there’s a huge potential for new discoveries both when it comes to science itself, but also for discoveries that can lead to innovation in medicine, conservation biology, agriculture and other practical uses.
Can it be done?
It seems like an almost impossible task, but that was also what people said when the Human Genome Project launched it in 1990. The scientists behind the project wants to be able to complete this new Earth BioGenome Project within ten years, and estimate that it will cost a total of $4.7 billion! This is $1.7 billion more than the Human Genome Project, but then again it will cover at least 1.5 million times as many genomes.
The price tag might seem insane, but keep in mind that the benefit of the Human Genome Project has been estimated by the Battelle Memorial Institute to be nearly $1 trillion, which means that the benefit is a lot higher than the cost.
The Earth BioGenome Project might not have direct applications for most humans, but it could potentially save lots of lives with the development of new medicine based on data from the project, or lead to increased or improved agriculture, which means that there’s a lot of potential here.
While I’m optimistic that it can be done, let’s not forget that 1.5 million species (or more) is an insane number, and every single sequence is a lot of work, so this will require a huge amount of dedication from scientists all around the world.
Thanks for reading
Thanks for reading my post about the Earth BioGenome Project. I linked to the original announcement which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the beginning, but here it is again if you want to take a look.
It will certainly be very exciting to follow this project in the coming years, and I’m sure I will be posting more about it once it gets going. Thanks for stopping by!
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