2025-08-07
7 分钟Hello, this is Alok Jha, host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
The Darwin Tree of Life, or DTOL, project aims to sequence the genomes of all animals,
fungi and plants found in Great Britain and Ireland, some 35,000 in total.
That is a colossal undertaking whose first phase is almost complete.
Speaking at a meeting of evolutionary biologists held in Beijing on July 23rd,
Peter Holland of the University of Oxford told scientists that he and his colleagues had already collected nearly 8,000 species.
By December, he added, they hoped to have sequenced 3,000 of them.
The current count is 2,034.
Collecting high-quality genomes is useful for several purposes.
Monitoring conservation, for example.
DTOL's genome of the pine hoverfly,
a critically endangered organism and Britain's rarest native insect,
has been used to evaluate the level of inbreeding in populations grown in captivity and reintroduced to the wild.
Similar analyses have been performed on the genomes of the Eurasian otter and the checkered skipper butterfly.
Such measures allow scientists to assess whether they need to introduce new individuals into a population to widen the gene pool.
There are also medical applications.
Researchers are now looking for ways to make use of DTOL's genome of the scourworm,