The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates

Short Wave

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🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

The Vertebrate Genomes Project: It's an ambitious effort by an international group of scientists to create a "Genome Ark" by sequencing the genomes of about 70,000 animal species. The hope is that through all of this gene sequencing, scientists will be able to answer some basic but important questions like: What makes a bird, well, a bird? What makes a mammal a mammal? Plus, with so many species on the verge of extinction, can scientists record their genetic information before they go extinct – or better yet, maybe help save the population from going extinct? Guest host Jon Hamilton, one of our favorite science correspondents, talks to Erich Jarvis, the chair of this project, to learn what this ark of animal genomes could mean for our future – and why a platypus qualified for early boarding.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Mariel Segarra from Life Kid.
0:03.0	There's a first time for everything, including giving to NPR.
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0:13.8	Make your gift at donate.npr.org.
0:17.1	And thank you.
0:19.3	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:25.0	Hey, hey, shortwavers.
0:26.8	John Hamilton here, filling in for Regina Barber, who is caravanning somewhere in the
0:31.1	Southern Hemisphere.
0:32.6	So here's a question.
0:33.9	What makes a human distinctly human?
0:36.6	Back in 2003, there was this idea that scientists might be about to answer that question
0:41.3	because they had, more or less, completed a map of the human genome.
0:45.3	That meant they could read all the genetic instructions you need to build and maintain a member of our species.
0:51.3	But that was really just the beginning, because a genome is the genetic
0:55.9	blueprint for just one species. To understand how humans are different from other animals and how
1:01.0	animals are different from one another, scientists will need lots of genomes. Fortunately, they're
1:06.4	working on it. So we're trying to take one or two individuals per species and sequence the genetic code,
1:13.4	the entire code of that animal that represents that species and do that for everybody.
1:20.8	And we're putting it into a database that we're calling genome arc, with the pun intended,
1:26.3	like, you know, an arc, to basically save the genetic
1:30.0	code of all species on the planet.
	...

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