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.

Comments

Re: What, no bugs or plants?

[pollarda]

I have to wonder if they are also going to sequence the mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is often forgotten in these discussions but if you ever want to really clone something, is vitally important.

Re:"Biblical proportions"?

[WolfgangVL]

I thought the very same thing, so I actually read the article.

From TFA

"The new sequences will be stored and made publically available at the Genome Ark database, a digital open-access library of genomes. Corporate sponsors DNAnexus and Amazon Web “have been instrumental in getting this project off the ground,” said Phillippy."

I'm certain there will be some catch on account of "corporate sponsors", but at face value, this actually looks pretty benevolent. I'm guessing the corporate dogs get some kind of "Right of patent" or the like on the inevitable research breakthroughs and discoveries that come of this.

Article also says it takes a week to sequence a single one, so we're talking 11,088,000 man hours (before setbacks, mistakes and equipment failures) with current technology, and it's worth pointing out that this is running in tandem with the Human Connectome Project, and possibly replicating the efforts of the Earth Biogenome Project.

While I'm all for a project like this, putting the complete genome of every vertebrate species on the planet into an open source project just for the lolz, this sounds way to good to be true.

Also, does putting the number 66k out there means we're finally past the whole "new species are being discovered everyday." phase of history?