BGE - Biodiversity Genomics Europe

Description

The Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) project has the overriding aim of accelerating the use of genomic science to enhance understanding of biodiversity, monitor biodiversity change, and guide interventions to address its decline.

Despite ground-breaking developments in both DNA barcoding and full genome sequencing, there remains a critical need to develop and strengthen functioning communities of practice at multiple scales that translate into building capacity, boosting complementarity among activities in individual countries and establishing mechanisms to democratise participation.

To address this challenge from the European perspective, the BGE consortium brings together the two networks,  BIOSCAN Europe (which focuses on DNA barcoding and metabarcoding ) and the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) (which focuses on genome sequencing).

The BGE project will tackle three fundamental objectives:

• Establish functioning biodiversity genomics networks at the European level to connect and grow community capacity to tackle the biodiversity crisis using genomic tools.

• Establish and implement large-scale biodiversity genomic data generation pipelines for Europe to accelerate the production and accessibility of genomic data for biodiversity characterisation, conservation and biomonitoring.

• Apply genomic tools to enhance understanding of pan-European biodiversity and biodiversity declines to improve the efficacy of management interventions and biomonitoring programmes.

These aims will be achieved by: 

• Establishing the European Nodes of iBOL (BIOSCAN Europe) and EBP (ERGA).
• Building comprehensive barcode reference libraries for European pollinators and key indicator species for freshwater and marine biomonitoring.
• Producing reference genomes from 350-500 species assembled and annotated and publicly available.
• Establishing and implementing protocols harmonising DNA biomonitoring and assessments of genome wide diversity in taxa and systems.

LIB is a lead partner in the BGE project and coordinates the ERGA stream work package “Field to lab” under the lead of Dr. Astrid Böhne, as well as several tasks concerning metadata standards, museum sampling and citizen science under the lead of Dr. Sarah Bourlat (Head of Metabarcoding section). 

LIB’s mission in BGE is :

• Produce metadata standards to be used in the project.
• Sampling of LIB’s museums specimens for barcode reference libraries
• Oversight of specimen collection, storage, and sample transfer together with metadata documentation and exchange based on to be extended and implemented SOPs.
• Define biobanking standards and guidelines for the Project, offering the option for central biobank storage at LIB Biobank.
• Proper biobanking and storage of all samples (including cell cultures where applicable),  with establishment of standards across the involved institutions.
• Coordinate the participation of citizen scientists and amateur expert taxonomists to enhance the construction of DNA barcode reference libraries and biomonitoring programmes by supporting local activities that engage citizen scientists in the co-creation of knowledge 

Location