 Have you ever tried to build your own family tree? If you have, then I'd guess you probably haven't got more than 100 years back, over 200 and I'd be really impressed. While the group of scientists I've about to meet are building their own family tree, except theirs goes back a few billion years and it's not just humans on it, it's all species in Britain and Ireland. Their project is called the Darwin Tree of Life and they're decoding the DNA of over 70,000 different life forms, trying to understand the history of life and much more along the way. Hello, I'm Esme. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi, Esme. I'm Elia and I work here at Kew Gardens. I'm Ross. I work at the early Institute in Norwich. So Elia, would you better tell me a little bit more about the Darwin Tree of Life and what it is? This is amazing, ambitious program. Isn't it all about DNA sequencing, about decoding the genomes of living organisms and by sequencing all the species in Britain and Ireland, it's going to provide us with this huge wealth of data, provide us a real snapshot of the life on these islands and how they've evolved together. Amazing. Well, you mentioned decoding genomes. Yep. What's the genome? What is a genome? Indeed. It's the full DNA code found in living organisms in each of their cells. And DNA itself, you know, it's made up of four different chemicals that we refer to by the first letter ATC and G. So, for example, if we're going to take your own genome and take a little bit of it and sequence it, we might see the DNA sequence going T-T-T-A-G-G-G or something like that. But our genome, of course, is much larger than that. But to illustrate how large, I brought along, you know, this lovely first copy of Harry Potter, the first book that was produced. And that's got just over 70,000 words. And if we counted all the letters, that's about 350,000 letters. And we might think that's a lot of letters, but in fact, our own genome is made up of 3.5 billion letters. And so that's equivalent to about 10,000 copies of this Harry Potter book. If we want to understand what are the different bits of the DNA doing, what we need to be able to do is to compare the DNA sequences between different genomes. So that's where the Darwin Tree of Life comes in, because we're going to generate sequences for all the animals, the plants and the fungi, as well as the protists, which live here. But I'm going to leave that to Ross, actually, to explain these amazing group, the protists. Yeah, Ross, tell me, what is a protist? So yeah, the Darwin Tree of Life project is going to sequence everything in the British isles. That includes the big stuff you can see, the oak trees, the animals, but also the really, really tiny organisms that you can't see without a microscope. And those are called the protists. Protist is a collective term for any single-celled organism that isn't a plant or an animal or a fungi. And because they're not one group, they're very, very different from each other, as well as from us. They're as different from each other as we are from plants, for example. So if you imagine every animal you can think of, all the dogs, people, birds, fish, insects, they all fall on one branch of the Tree of Life. All of the plants are on another branch and all the fungi and yeast are on another branch. And there are eight other branches with potentially as much diversity as all of the animal kingdom. But in order to access all that information, we have to get the genome sequence. But Erna at the Wellcome Sanger Institute can tell you more about that. Hi, Erna, I'm Esmeel, lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you too. So everything has its own genome sequence, which is microscopically tiny and has millions and millions of letters in it. I want to know how you can possibly read that genome sequence. Yeah, good question. I'll tell you how we go from this sample like a leaf to a full genome sequence. So first we've got collectors in the field who find a species and like this daisy, and they take a small part of it like this leaf. And they want to get the leaf and the DNA inside of it to us in the best condition possible. So they put in a tube like this and send it to us frozen in the lab where we need to get the DNA out. So we need to break open the cell, release the DNA, and we separate the DNA out from all the rest of the material inside the leaf. So we've got different teams with various expertise for different organisms, and they use methods to get out the DNA in a tube like this, which we then send for a full genome sequencing. And what is genome sequencing? Sorry, I need to know. No, it's perfect. Genome sequencing is where we use these machines that work out the order of the A's, T's, G's, and C's in the DNA. So the information we get out of these genome sequencers is in these little big jigsaw of DNA fragments. So we need to then use these super powerful computers, which then compare the fragments and see where they overlap to then piece together your full, complete genome. Just for a sense of scale, for a genome for this daisy, for example, if the letters were all this size, it would stretch all the way around the world, the genome of the daisy. Amazing. Once we get our genomes, we then need to study them to get the most out of them. So we've got computer scientists called bioinformaticians. They study these genomes and find the most interesting parts. And at the end of the project, we intend to have 70,000 species. So that'll be, we'll need a lot of bioinformaticians to study those genomes. That is a lot of species. Yes, it is. Well, thank you so much for explaining that to me. I'll go and catch up with Ilya and Ross. Thank you. Well, it was so interesting to speak to Arnold just then. What happens, Ross, once we have the genomes? So once we have the genomes, that's when they're really interesting stuff can happen because that's when the analysis happens. And actually, we don't really know necessarily what we're going to find. We're spending all this time and effort gathering all of this data. And we don't really know what it's going to lead to. If you think back to Darwin himself, he didn't set out to discover the theory of evolution when he set sail aboard the Beagle. But it was by collecting the data that led him to that conclusion. But we are already making strides in that area. At the early institute, we've sequenced the genome of an organism called Euglena. And it kind of lives in ponds. It's that thin, scummy layer you sometimes find on stagnant water. And it's quite often mistaken for an algae, but it's not related to algae at all. It's actually got an algal cell living inside its cell. It might be that we can bioengineer this to fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce biofuels, which could have huge implications for climate change and global warming. So fascinating. And, Elia, you said earlier on 70,000 species. How are you getting on? We're getting there. We're starting to get towards our first target, which is to release these sequences for nearly 2,000 species by the end of this year. We hope to be then moving towards our next target, which to go for the 10,000 species and build up from there. So we're getting there. Amazing. Well, good luck with it. Thank you. So that's the Darwin Tree of Life project. It's a collaboration between 10 different research institutes, so Kew Gardens, Welcome Sanger, and Erlum, who we met today, plus seven others. They're all working together to sequence the genomes of all those plants, animals, fungi, and protists, and share those genomes with everybody. They're going to be providing new tools for conservation, new ideas for biomedicine and bioengineering, new connections for better understanding evolution, and they're going to change the way we do biology.