Blog: stories.rbge.org.uk
The Darwin Tree of Life project aims to sequence the genomes of all 60,000 species of eukaryotic organisms in Britain and Ireland. It is a collaboration between biodiversity, genomics and analysis partners that hopes to transform the way we do biology, conservation and biotechnology.
As a Genome Acquisition Lab for the Wellcome Trust-funded Darwin Tree of Life project, a major focus at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is bryophytes. The goal of this phase of the project is to generate high quality genome sequences from one species per family within Britain and Ireland, and our contribution towards this is to obtain fresh material from collections of living mosses, liverworts and hornworts, both from wild habitats and from within the Gardens.