{"id":242310,"date":"2023-08-21T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2023-08-21T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=242310"},"modified":"2023-08-15T06:46:09","modified_gmt":"2023-08-15T05:46:09","slug":"the-race-to-save-the-worlds-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/08\/the-race-to-save-the-worlds-dna\/","title":{"rendered":"The Race to Save the World\u2019s DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"

A scientific rescue mission aims to analyze every plant, animal, and fungus before it\u2019s too late.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

9 Aug 2023 – <\/em>Four years ago, a few hundred miles off the coast of West Africa, a crane lifted a bulbous yellow submarine from the research vessel Poseidon and lowered it into the Atlantic. Inside the sub, Karen Osborn, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution who was swaddled in warm clothes, tried to ward off nausea. During half an hour of safety checks, Osborn watched water slosh across the submarine\u2019s round window, washing-machine style. Then the crew gave the all-clear and the vessel descended. In the waters of Cape Verde, a volcanic archipelago that is famous for its marine life, Osborn felt the seasickness dissipate. She pressed her face against the glass, peering out at sea creatures until her forehead bruised. \u201cYou\u2019re just completely mesmerized by getting to look at these animals in their natural habitat,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

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Osborn was on a mission to find several elusive species, including a bioluminescent worm called Poeobius<\/em>, and to sequence their genes for a global database of DNA. \u201cWe need the genome to figure out how these things are related to each other,\u201d she explained. \u201cOnce we have that tree, we can start asking interesting questions about how those animals evolved, how they\u2019ve changed through time, how they\u2019ve adapted to their habitats.\u201d Eventually, such genomes could inspire profound innovations, from new crops to medical cures. Osborn was starting to worry, however: she had already made several trips in the submarine and had not seen a single Poeobius<\/em>. Each worm measures just a few centimetres in length and feeds on marine snow, or organic detritus that falls from the surface. Because it is yellow on one end, like a cigarette, it is sometimes called the butt worm.<\/p>\n

As the pilot steered into deeper waters, Osborn operated a suction hose at the end of a robotic arm. Whenever she spotted organisms that she wanted to sample\u2014crustaceans, sea butterflies, jellies\u2014she\u2019d suck them through a tube and into a collection box that was filled with seawater. She started to wish that the submarine had a rest room on board. Then, a few hundred metres down, she finally saw a group of Poeobius<\/em>. \u201cOh, that\u2019s what we want!\u201d she remembers exclaiming. \u201cGo! Go get that!\u201d The pilot slowly turned the sub and Osborn sucked up the worms.<\/p>\n

Back on the ship, even before using the rest room, Osborn deposited her boxes in an onboard laboratory. \u201cIt\u2019s always exciting to climb out and go look at all the samplers, and take them into the lab and see what animals you\u2019ve gotten,\u201d she told me. She placed one of the Poeobius<\/em> worms under a microscope, anesthetized it, sliced off a bit of gelatinous tissue, and placed it into a vial, which contained a liquid that would protect the DNA from deterioration. (The butt worm did not survive.) Back at the Smithsonian, a team would extract the genetic material and sequence it. It would soon become a new branch on a growing tree of life.<\/p>\n

The evolution of life on Earth\u2014a process that has spanned billions of years and innumerable strands of DNA\u2014could be considered the biggest experiment in history. It has given rise to amoebas and dinosaurs; fireflies and flytraps; even mammals that look like ducks and fish that look like horses. These species have solved countless ecological problems, finding novel ways to eat, evade, defend, compete, and multiply. Their genomes contain information that humans could use to reconstruct the origins of life, develop new foods and medicines and materials, and even save species that are dying out. But we are also losing much of the data; humans are one of the main causes of an ongoing mass extinction. More than forty thousand animal, fungal, and plant species are considered threatened\u2014and those are just the ones we know about.<\/p>\n

Osborn is part of a group of scientists who are mounting a kind of scientific salvage mission. It is known as the Earth BioGenome Project, or E.B.P., and its goal is to sequence a genome from every plant, animal, and fungus on the planet, as well as from many single-celled organisms, such as algae, retrieving the results of life\u2019s grand experiment before it\u2019s too late. \u201cThis is a completely wonderful and insane goal,\u201d Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor who works with the E.B.P., told me. The effort, described by its organizers as a \u201cmoonshot for biology,\u201d will likely cost billions of dollars\u2014yet it does not currently have any direct funding, and depends instead on the volunteer work of scientists who do. Researchers will need to scour oceans, deserts, and rain forests to collect samples before species die out. And, as new species are discovered, the task of sequencing all of them will only grow. \u201cThat\u2019s a heavy aspiration that will probably never be entirely achieved,\u201d Greely, who is seventy-one, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s like, when you\u2019re my age, planting a young oak tree in your yard. You\u2019re not going to live to see that be a mature oak, but your hope is somebody will.\u201d<\/p>\n

For hundreds of years, biologists have roamed the globe in an epic effort to collect and categorize the life on Earth. In the seventeen-hundreds, after traversing Sweden to document its flora and fauna, Carl Linnaeus helped create the system that scientists still use to classify and name species, from Homo sapiens<\/em> to Poeobius meseres<\/em>. In 1831, Charles Darwin set out aboard H.M.S. Beagle to collect living and fossilized specimens, which inspired his theory of natural selection. The discovery of DNA, in the nineteenth century, offered a new way to classify species: by comparing their genetic material. DNA\u2019s four building blocks\u2014adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C)\u2014encode profound differences between organisms. By studying their sequence, we might come to speak life\u2019s language.<\/p>\n

Scientists didn\u2019t even begin to sequence a DNA molecule until 1968. In 1977, they sequenced the roughly five thousand base pairs in a virus that invades bacteria. And, in 1990, the Human Genome Project started the thirteen-year process of sequencing almost all of the three billion base pairs in our DNA. Its organizers called the endeavor \u201cone of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of all time, even compared to splitting the atom or going to the moon.\u201d Since then, researchers have been filling in gaps and improving the quality of their sequences, in part by using a new format known as a telomere-to-telomere, or T2T, genome. The first T2T human genome was sequenced only last year, but already scientists with the Earth BioGenome Project are talking about repeating this process for every known eukaryotic species. (Eukaryotes are organisms whose cells have nuclei.)<\/p>\n