Busy about the tree of life: reference genomics for biodiversity

A high quality reference genome sequence has the ability to transform evolutionary and population genetics of any species. The Darwin Tree of Life project (DToL) is a partnership between biodiversity organisations and their networks of expert collectors, sequencing partners and analysis teams across the UK. We are undertaking a decadal project to generate high-quality genomes for all the ~70,000 species in Britain and Ireland - marine, freshwater and terrestrial, and plant, fungal, animal and "protist”. Similarly the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics project is collaborating globally to sequence the genomes of ~500 symbiotic organisms - animals, plants, fungi and protozoa that interact in photosynthetic, chemosymbiotic, parasitic and other symbioses (about 1000 genomes overall). We have built a system that takes a specimen from the field through identification, processing, sequencing, assembly and annotation to produce a reference genome in ENA annotated in Ensembl. We aim to produce chromosomally-contiguous assemblies, and to capture and release mitochondrial and symbiont genomes. We release all our data openly as they are generated. The DToL project is most advanced: see https://darwintreeoflife.org for an introduction to the project, https://tolqc.cog.sanger.ac.uk/index.html for our raw and in process data and https://portal.darwintreeoflife.org/ for representation of our data in ENA. All genomes will be published openly in Wellcome Open Research. I will present on behalf of my many colleagues our successes, including a sneak look at the first hundreds of genomes and the biology they encode.