New European project Biodiversity Genomics Europe
ZRC SAZU, more precisely the Jovan Hadži Institute of Biologicy, is one of 104 European scientific research institutions participating in the Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) project, which aims to use genetic and genomic approaches to slow the extinction of species and the decline of biodiversity around the world. The project, which officially starts today, September 28, 2022, will radically change conservation science with new approaches, scientists claim. The importance of the project is compared to nothing more and nothing less than the Human Genome Project, for which a group of scientists won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2002.
Time is running out. As much as a quarter of all species on our planet – roughly speaking, these are animals, plants and fungi – are threatened with extinction, which is putting food production, water supply and nutrient cycles at risk. Genomics is one of the key weapons in the fight against extinction, and the BGE consortium will provide a giant leap forward with a new way of using it.
Despite centuries of scientific research, as many as 80 percent of all species in the world are still waiting to be discovered and described by scientists. But even once species have been formally described, some are difficult to distinguish from each other due to their many similarities. This is where genetics and genomics come to the rescue, enabling the inventory (so-called mapping) of the relationships and interdependencies between species, and in the next phase, it will also be possible to formulate predictions about how individuals and groups may respond to changes in the environment. The scientific research institutions in the BGE consortium will achieve this by using two methods based on the genetic code in DNA: so-called DNA barcoding and genome sequencing.
What are DNA barcodes? It is a technology that distinguishes between different species based on short DNA sequences – similar to how products in a supermarket are distinguished from each other, each marked with its own barcode. Genomic sequencing, on the other hand, provides the order of nucleotides in DNA for the entire genome (the entire genetic code of an organism).
The BGE project is worth more than 20 million euros, and 29 countries are participating in it. As Dr. Matjaž Gregorič from the Jovan Hadži Institute of Biology ZRC SAZU points out, Slovenia is one of the so-called biodiversity hotspots – areas with an unusually high level of biodiversity. “Biodiversity hotspots usually also have many endemic species, that is, species that only occur there or are very geographically limited. There are generally far fewer endemic species in European countries than, for example, in the tropics, so Slovenia does not stand out in terms of their number on a global scale. "We are quite high in the world in terms of overall biodiversity and we certainly stand out in Europe, where we are the most diverse country or at least a candidate for one," Gregorič added. The reason for the high level of biodiversity, according to his explanation, is that Slovenia lies at the junction of four biogeographic regions, which is why all possible species occur here: Pannonian, Alpine, Mediterranean, marine, subterranean ...
The Slovenian consortium connects eight Slovenian institutions that work in the field of molecular ecology and nature protection: the University of Maribor, the University of Ljubljana, the Faculty of Environmental Protection from Velenje, the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the National Institute of Biology, the Forestry Institute of Slovenia, and the Natural History Museum of Slovenia.
Photo by Wellcome Sanger Institute/BGE