A group of researchers have announced plans to sequence the genome of nearly every living thing on planet Earth. If you thought the Human Genome Project was ambitious you ain’t seen nothing yet!
The goal of the Earth BioGenome Project is to sequence the genome of eurakyotes i.e. everything that contains a nucleus. Which is pretty much everything (plants, animals, etc.) with the exception of bacteria.
This is quite the undertaking. And an expensive one at that. It took nearly $5 billion and 13 years to sequence the human genome. Doing the same thing for the rest of life on Earth would seemingly take forever and be too expensive to pull off. And yet here we are. With a goal of $4.7 billion and ten years. How is that even possible?
In a word: motivation. For we are talking about creating new drugs, generating new sources of food, counteracting Climate Change, and doing a host of other things that may very well determine the future of the species. When the stakes are this high you don’t take no for an answer.
To start out, just think about what this project could mean for drug discovery alone. Considering that we’ve only scratched the surface of discovering drugs in nature this research could open up a myriad of possibilities.
According to Futurism:
“So far, scientists have only sequenced the DNA of .2 percent of all known eukaryotic species. That’s helped scientists discover and understand a number of medications that exist in nature, from morphine to aspirin. What kinds of potentially life-saving compounds remain hidden in the other 99.8 percent of un-sequenced species (or in the estimated 10 million to 15 million unknown species)?”
But that’s not all. In addition to drug discovery there are plenty of other benefits that this project could have as well. Such as helping researchers, “hone in on new sources of food to nourish the planet’s growing population and new resources for helping us take care of its soil, air, and water.”
A good example of this would be cockroach milk. It’s said that the milk from the Pacific Beatle Cockroach contains 3x as much protein as milk from cows. Sequencing the genome of everything would help us determine if there’s something else out there that would work even better. Perhaps with 30x the protein. Or 200x the protein. Until we get in there and conduct the research we just don’t know.
It’ll be quite the undertaking for sure. But as the researchers state in their inaugural paper it’ll be worth it:
“The greatest legacy of the EBP will be the gift of knowledge — a complete Digital Library of Life that contains the collective biological intelligence of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary history. This knowledge will guide future discoveries for generations and may ultimately determine the survival of life on our planet.”
Amen to that.
Is the Earth BioGenome Project the Greatest Idea Ever?
Leave a comment