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Plan To Build a Genetic Noah's Ark Includes a Staggering 66,000 Species (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: An international consortium involving over 50 institutions has announced an ambitious project to assemble high-quality genome sequences of all 66,000 vertebrate species on Earth, including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. With an estimated total cost of $600 million dollars, it's a project of biblical proportions. It's called the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), and it's being organized by a consortium called Genome 10K, or G10K. As its name implies, this group had initially planned to sequence the genomes of at least 10,000 vertebrate species, but now, owing to tremendous advances and cost reductions in gene sequencing technologies, G10K has decided to up the ante, aiming to sequence both a male and female individual from each of the approximately 66,000 vertebrate species on Earth. Cofounders of the project announced the new goal yesterday at a press briefing held during the opening session of the 2018 Genome 10K conference, currently being held at Rockefeller University in New York City. The project will involve over 150 experts from 50 institutions in 12 countries.
I set up a cauldron and lit a fire below, in to the water one of each species did I throw.
Boiled and brothed how could I know, from a goal of 10000 the project would grow.
Now little children welcome to my candy house, do you want to eat or play with the mouse.
Whether a flamingo or old famous grouse, I can make you a pet or revive your spouse.
I think this is an excellent idea and my first reaction was, "Only 66000 species?" But because of the limited scope of the project that makes sense. However, in order for a project like this to really be useful in a worst-case scenario, all these vertebrates will need some company. Hopefully the other arc-style projects can supply that.
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but there's no female in his species. He's like a Moclan, only without the charm.
Maybe they were thinking of the early Hollywood biblical film epics. They cost a lot of money, at the time.
Anyway, to get back to the cynicism, what's the bet this company decides they own those genetic sequences once they've sorted them out?
That way you could create a better model.
I guess once you've sequenced them all, you could beam the info to space, you know, just in case...
if I didn't have google.
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I think you need some lateral movement with this. Otherwise you get some strange bed-fellows.I'm thinking the lard section of Walmart would work well enough. There's a tasty bunch that could facilitate a movement well within the boundaries of such an endeavor. Just a thought.
That's actually peanuts, not considering the complexity but seems a right step in a good direction.
but for us its pointless as we are killing the bio sphere they need to survive!
they already did that movie plot.
That the data could be potentially be analyzed using a neural net, to find similarities in species across one another. Or any neverending number of uses you can think of.
Supernatural climate change and divine wisdom leads to antediluvian inbreeding depression. God damn it!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Vertebrates without invertebrates do not a working ecosystem make.
I hope that when they sequence all these critters they take the time for quality documentation! Would be very annoying for future generations/aliens if they manage to create the first example, only to find out they don't have any food!
Are they trying to get the backing of religious groups? Why the hell would they name it that? Why not DNA Vault or something like the 'Global Seed Vault'
Someone has been playing to much Halo.
"Genetic Noah's Ark" seems to imply that this data can eventually be used to revive species. There is no technology to do it and no indication it will eventually be developed. Also, sequencing contains errors. Lots of them. Enough to make this data useless for revival.
Also, successful revival would require significant genetic variance, hundreds to thousands of individual organisms, not just "one male and one female". Otherwise inbreeding will kill them.
There might be some advantages to having this database, but "Genetic Noah's Ark" is just a lie.
I note that whilst the article has plenty about the challenge of sequencing that many DNA sequences at high quality and low cost, there is no mention of the sheer logistical complexity of getting samples from 66,000 different species some of which are presumably very rare.
No doubt quite a lot can be achieved by contacting a great number of zoos around the world, but it seems to me that there must be a great many species not held in collections. One rarely sees bats in zoos for example and I understand that there are about 1000 species of those. There must be many bird species known only through observation and I dread to think about all the fish species, particularly from the deep sea, which only occasionally get caught.
It might be interesting to know if they can collect DNA from stuffed specimens or those preserved in spirit.
Is Musk or vampire Thiel supporting this? Because it sure sounds like a late stage capitalism libertarian escape plan phase...
Considering the number of species, that 66,000 is a drop in the bucket of animal DNA.
I don't consider that as any kind of definition for "staggering" if you are actually trying to do any kind of ark.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault currently has about 968,000 samples, and can hold up to about 4,500,000, and theirs aren't genetic profiles, it's actual packets of seeds.
As to the VPA, will those "high definition genetic profiles" have enough data to replicate the DNA? Why don't they have tissue samples?
Yes, sure, this is going to be helpful for biologists and others, if the data is accessible, but will it do anything to help SAVE the animals, which is something pretty much considered the prime directive of any kind of ARK
Rebuild a vivable specimen from digitalized DNA. I know that now we are far from that, but it's the only way to guarrantee that DNA is correct or at least, viable for reconstruction.
Turn species into data and back from that, we enough candidates to allow restore the species...
It's a backup for extinction and a future tool for space colonization (bring data, not real life until you have the space).
The consortium is spearheaded by InGen.
They really ought to sample more than one of each male and female in case of genetic defects.
They're sequencing vertebrate species - add that word and the first Google results say there's only 40,000 instead of the 8.7 million total estimate.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Good grief Bobbi Buzkill, next you're going to try to tell us "Library of Congress" is a unit of distance, not time.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Even if they could use the DNA to bring a species back to life...
One of each sex isn't a large enough population to bring them back from the dead. There isn't enough genetic variation in two members. They need to have samples of a lot more of each species.
And this is something that I've never heard brought up in science programs that talk about bringing back extinct animals. (I'm not saying nobody has thought about it, I just haven't heard that they have.) All animals have an extensive micro biome in their digestive system. Cloning an animal doesn't do anything to recreate that.
Does the animal brought back going to have a place to live and food to eat? The animal went extinct for a reason. Most likely it's habitat lose (or illegal hunting). Unless we've recreated a safe place for the animals to live there's no point in bringing them back because they will just become extinct again.
An extreme example is the koala. It's diet consists only of eucalyptus leaves which it can only digest due to the bacteria in it's digestive tract. If it were to go extinct having just the DNA of the koala is completely useless because it will starve if brought back.