Researchers reboot ambitious effort to sequence all vertebrate genomes, but challenges loom:
In a bid to garner more visibility and support, researchers eager to sequence the genomes of all vertebrates today officially launched the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), releasing 15 very high quality genomes of 14 species. But the group remains far short of raising the funds it will need to document the genomes of the estimated 66,000 vertebrates living on Earth.
The project, which has been underway for 3 years, is a revamp and renaming of an effort begun in 2009 called the Genome 10K Project (G10K), which aimed to decipher the genomes of 10,000 vertebrates. G10K produced about 100 genomes, but they were not very detailed, in part because of the cost of sequencing. Now, however, the cost of high-quality sequencing has dropped to less than $15,000 per billion DNA bases…
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Funding remains an obstacle. To date, the VGP has raised $2.5 million of the $6 million needed to sequence a representative species from each of the 260 major branches of the vertebrate family tree. To reach the goal of all 66,000 vertebrates will require about $600 million, Jarvis says.
Though a lot of the details are different (sequencing vs. genotyping, vertebrates vs. humans), many of the general issues that David Mittelman and I brought up in our Genome Biology comment, Consumer genomics will change your life, whether you get tested or not, apply. That is, to some extent this is an area of science where technology and economics are just as important as science in driving progress.
I remember back in graduate school that people were talking about sequencing hundreds of vertebrates. But even in the few years since then, the landscape has shifted. I’m so little a biologist that I actually didn’t know there were only ~66,000 vertebrate species!
And yet this brings up a reasonable question from many scientists who came up in an era of more data scarcity: what are the questions we’re trying to answer here?
Challenges include justifying sequencing all these crappy genomes without research communities behind them https://t.co/HjpIlhXDSu
— Andrew Kern (@pastramimachine) September 14, 2018
Science involves people. It’s not an abstraction. Throwing a whole lot of data out there does not mean that someone will be there to analyze it, or, that we’ll get interesting insights. To be frank, the original Human Genom Project project should probably tell us that, as its short-term benefits were clearly oversold.
In relation to how cheap data storage is and the declining price point of sequencing, I think my assertion that a genome, a sequence, is not a depreciating asset still holds. There is the initial cost of sequencing and assembling and the long term cost of storage, but these are small potatoes. The bigger considerations are the salaries of scientific labor and the opportunity costs. Sequencing tens of thousands of genomes may not get us anywhere, but really we’re not going to lose that much.
Ultimately I side with those who believe that the existence of the data itself will change the landscape of possible questions being asked, and therefore generate novel science. But it’s pretty incredible to even be debating this issue in 2018 of sequencing all vertebrates. That’s something to reflect on.
I remember years ago looking up how many mammal species there were, how many birds, etc. and also being surprised how few there were. When people invoke a statistic like, “there are 10 to 20 million species on earth”, the vast majority are insects, fungi, clams, bacteria, and such.” Even more so, of all the millions of species yet to be discovered, a miniscule percentage will be vertebrates.