It looks like the beginnings of a consortium are taking shape, with the goal of sequencing all life on earth. As something of a genomicist, I am psyched by the goal, unattainable as it may be. I also want to say why lofty goals are helpful, and this one will be too.
The Human Genome Project took years to finish, and ended up costing about a dollar per base-pair, which are the chemical “letters” that make up the genetic code. Since then, sequencing has become orders of magnitude cheaper. The current genome sequencing leader, Illumina, famously announced that sequencing a genome could be done for a thousand dollars. If we compare that to the investment required for the human sequence, we certainly have made strides. This is due to the technology we use to sequence genomes. The most popular way to do it today is to take a sample of DNA from an organism, which is typically present in long stretches of DNA called chromosomes, and break it into short fragments. Since we have a lot of DNA in the sample, we end up having more than one copy of each letter of the genome. Using the powerful genome sequences that we have developed , we can sequence a little bit of each of these fragments before using a computer program to take the short reads and assemble them into a contiguous sequence. If you can imagine taking a few hundred copies of “Moby Dick” and randomly cutting out stretches of letters before trying to reassemble the book from the fragments by looking for overlap between random fragments, then you understand the basic strategy that genome sequencing uses today.
In spite of the cutting edge technology, it still takes a ton of work to go from a draft genome assembly–which is what you could immediately get after putting a thousand dollars into an Illumina machine and plugging the resulting reads into the computer to assemble–to the kind of gold-standard genome assemblies that we have in well-studied organisms like mice and humans. Typically, more work has to be put in to fill in gaps in the assembly that result from highly repetitive DNA, which confounds assemblers. Scientists sometimes have to do follow-up experiments to prove that their genome assembly is real and is not just a computer error. Finally, the genome sequence is useless until you start to figure out where the genes and other features lie. This means more follow-up experiments and comparing the genome to those of other related organisms.
All of this take a significant investment of time and treasure, and there is no way that we could do that for all life on earth. You would never be able to have a gold-standard genome assembly for every organism on earth. Much like the oft-told anecdote about restaurants in New York City–where it is said that you could never eat at every restaurant in the city because new ones are opening for business and going out of business faster than you could visit them all–new organisms are evolving and going extinct all of the time. The idea of putting in enough work to get something as polished as the fruit fly genome, let alone the mouse or human genome, is laughable if you start to think about it. But it would allow researchers to gain an appreciation for the diversity of life that exists on earth, specifically at the DNA level. Just having fractions of the genomes of most of the species on earth would allow us to better understand the evolutionary relationships between all life on earth.
As for this goal being a little too big to handle, big goals are important to push us to new heights. Getting to the moon seemed ridiculous at the time, and sequencing the human genome was impossible when we first started to plan how to do it. These goals ended up being attainable, but just imagine if they had not been. Even if we had never made it to the moon, we would have still developed the kind of technology that allowed us to put satellites into orbit that now power our ubiquitous mobile devices. Even if the human genome proved intractable, we would have still ended up with improved sequencing technology. This is because setting these lofty goals has the effect of pushing us to achieve things that we would have never thought to accomplish without a lofty goal. If we set out sequence all life on earth, just imagine what we might find we can do along the way.
*I found a post by professor/blogger Jeff Ollerton who also had his own take on the proposal. While he and I do not agree, he has an interesting take that I enjoyed reading. It should also be said that he has more expertise than me in this area.
developingbio 