Specimen of a rose curculio, Merhynchites bicolor, a leaf-rolling weevil species recorded in east and central Kansas. A University of Kansas team will help envision a nationwide pipeline providing the U.S. scientific community the opportunity to nominate species like this for sequencing at much lower costs. Credit: Samanta Orellana
In the United States, a mere sliver of the nation’s biodiversity has been recorded using high-quality reference genomes. Beyond giving a better understanding of biodiversity and ecosystems, data from high-quality reference genomes can enable scientific advances in conservation, agriculture, pest and disease control, medicine and biotechnology.
Now, investigators from Rockefeller University, University of Kansas and Arizona State University, with $11.9 million in support from the National Scientific Foundation, will enable researchers to envision and assemble new American genomic infrastructure. The project is called Scalable Community Infrastructure for Biodiversity Genomics (SCIBG).
Today, efforts to produce reference genomes can be costly and fragmented, with inconsistencies in sampling, preservation and sample and data management practices. This project aims to build the capacity to produce reference genomes at a vastly larger scale, with a long-term goal of 60 genomes each week.
The end result would be a much broader and more representative sampling of biodiversity, with the researchers advancing a nationwide pipeline providing the U.S. scientific community the opportunity to nominate species for sequencing at much lower costs and under a transparent, ethical species selection and governance structure.
The University of Kansas team, specifically, will produce more than half the samples in the project's internally prioritized sequencing pipeline. Another role will involve making the high-quality reference genomes broadly accessible to researchers and the public. The team will produce a public-facing digital tool based on an existing biodiversity specimen-data platform called Symbiota.
The team says an eventual national infrastructure producing high-quality reference genomes would boost research into evolution, species conservation, agriculture, medicine and biotechnology.
Data from University of Kansas