The world’s top scientists will gather in Barcelona on May 15th to study each species cell by cell in order to complete an atlas that will reveal the evolution and origin of life on Earth. We talked about ideas. human thought and disease. The seemingly ambitious idea came from Arnau Seve Pedros, a 37-year-old biologist from the village of La Friola in Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. Seve Pedros studies cells, but his real passion is ornithology. He travels to exotic locations and makes sure to find every bird species in the area, even if it means spending a week chasing a nondescript brown bird. This all-encompassing ambition may explain his determination to compile what he calls the “Cellular Atlas of Biodiversity.”
Seve Pedros works at the Genome Regulation Center near Barcelona’s Somorrostro Beach. This beach, once a shanty district, is now home to six cutting-edge scientific institutions. The biologist’s office is small and simple. Her three jellyfish named Gary, Jerry, and Cherry swim around a circular aquarium. From his desk, the researcher declares that his project is no longer a pipe dream. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, founded in California by the Intel co-founder and his wife, has just donated 3.6 million euros to launch the initiative.
Seve Pedros already made global headlines in September. His team analyzed his four known species of platyzoans, strange creatures shaped like little pancakes, cell by cell. They are marine organisms that diverged from humans 800 million years ago and are only about 1 mm in size, each consisting of 50,000 cells. Seve Pedros and his colleagues’ meticulous research reveals that this tiny creature, which has no brain or other organs, has something similar to neurons, the thinking cells. became.
The biologist claims that the Cellular Atlas of Biodiversity will reveal many secrets of nature. “We have to be prepared to encounter unexpected discoveries,” he says. “Our placozoan research was not done with the aim of understanding the evolution of neurons and the nervous system. That naturalistic motivation is what I like best. We explore It’s home.”
All living things have unique DNA in each cell. For humans, DNA is like a piano with her 20,000 keys; that’s genes. All cells have the same piano, but each one plays a different tune. So some cells are neurons in the brain, others are muscles or part of the fat in the midsection. Seve Pedros says that a few years ago his group created the first cell-by-cell atlas of cauliflower corals, reef-building organisms in the shallow waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Analysis revealed 40 different cell types. One of his creatures is responsible for holding the coral to the rock, and it constantly touches a key that triggers the production of antibacterial compounds, as if it wants to clean its surroundings. Research into coral cells has revealed a new substance with antibiotic potential, amid global alarm over the threat of superbugs that are resistant to all known drugs. “It was a surprise,” Seve Pedros says. “The potential for finding new genes with new functions is very high.”
The May 15 meeting in Barcelona was a success and was the first time a scientific partnership of this scale had been launched in Spain. The meeting included leading figures in the field, including American biologist Harris Lewin, coordinator of the Earth Biogenome Project, which aims to read the DNA of all species of animals, plants, fungi and protists. Leaders of international organizations were in attendance. Also taking part were Stein Aerts, a Belgian bioengineer who developed the Frycell Atlas, and Mark Blaxter, a British researcher whose Darwin Tree of Life project is studying 70,000 species in the UK. Israeli scientist Aviv Regev, head of the Human Cell Atlas, and German Sarah Teichmann participated via video conference.
Seve Pedros said the 3.6 million euros from the Moore Foundation will be used to start “phase zero” of the project. The biologists will work with Irene Papatheodore of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, to fine-tune various analytical methods and set up a vast database infrastructure. “We want to already have a place set up for the data that we’re going to start creating at scale,” he says.
“A lot of people around the world are working on this, but there is a lack of coordination,” Seve Pedros adds. “When you want to access some kind of results, there’s utter chaos. There’s no standards of any kind. There’s also no coordinated effort to see who’s doing what. It’s the Wild West. is.”
Seve Pedros is currently finalizing an article about the effort for a major scientific journal. “I know many people who have done many experiments that didn’t work and wasted thousands of euros, but there is no culture to publish their methods and explain what went wrong.” Seve Pedros says. “The next person who tries it will be back at square one. We want to keep the field open and make sure no one is keeping magic tricks to themselves.”
Phase 0 of the project will examine eight species that have already been analyzed cell by cell to test the protocol. This group consists of fruit flies and earthworms. Caenorhabditis elegansannelids (also belonging to the group of insects), plants of the genus Liverwort, sea anemones, fungi, brown algae, and perhaps sea urchins and starfish. “We want to study organisms that are difficult to handle in hard cases and test six cell-by-cell analysis methods,” says Seve-Pedros. Typical techniques involve using force, sound waves, and enzymes to break up the target into small pieces to obtain a suspension of single cells. Next, find out which key on her DNA piano each cell plays. “We want to have a universal method,” says Seve Pedros.
This project opens up a new world of science. “Cell atlases do more than just tell you about the biology of the organisms you’re analyzing,” says Seve-Pedros. “You can also study interactions with other things inside the cell.” His team investigated an outbreak of microalgae in the ocean that was associated with a giant virus that hijacked the cell’s machinery. Scientists can analyze what types of cells the invaders reside in and how they commandeer the piano keys.
Seve Pedros is already calculating what phase one of the project will look like. “You can start with about 100 species across the tree of life,” he says. “An additional 10 to 15 million euros would be needed. Ideally, we would like to sample organisms on both sides of major changes, such as the emergence of multicellular life or the origin of the nervous system.”
Seve Pedros grew up among the grassland birds typical of the arid region of Lleida. He has conducted expeditions to study bird life in North Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Chile, and Israel, observing more than 2,000 species. He recently saw his first Tenmalm owl in Spain. In the jungles of eastern Australia, he encountered a cassowary, a legendary bird up to two meters in size that is known to kill humans. His small office in Barcelona is unadorned, save for a picture of a tapaculo (a Chilean brown bird) and a postcard with the face of Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution by natural selection. “We are interested in studying the evolution of cell types,” he says. “But first, there are a lot of dense and boring technical problems that need to be solved.”
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