Researchers from the Museum and Natural England undertook a three-day bioblitz in the north west of England. They were able to collect and identify hundreds of species of invertebrates, and even began sequencing DNA in a pop-up field lab.

An ambitious plan to sequence the genomes of all living organisms in the UK is underway.

Scientists, naturalists and volunteers were out in force collecting invertebrates in the sand dunes of Ainsdale National Nature Reserve in Merseyside. Located in the north west of England, the reserve and the surrounding environment provided a diversity of habitats - from dunes and beach to freshwater and salt marsh - in which the teams could search for a huge variety of species. After collecting the invertebrates, which included insects, crustaceans, polychaetes, molluscs and arachnids, the researchers brought them back to a pop-up laboratory built on site. There, Museum researchers had set up all the necessary equipment to isolate, amplify and even sequence parts of the animals' DNA.

The Museum's Principal Curator in Charge of Insects, Dr Gavin Broad, says, 'We have been collaborating with Natural England to get many of their experts and surveyors along with our scientists out in the field. Together, we want to do a lot of invertebrate recording and specifically to start building a DNA barcode library.' This will become a reference library, linked to images of the invertebrates that were sampled and the specimens themselves, which can then be used for the Darwin Tree of Life project. When a species' genome is sampled for this project, it will then be compared to the DNA barcode library to corroborate an identification of what species it belongs to. Earth BioGenome Project The Darwin Tree of Life project was announced late last year. It is being led by the Sanger Institute, but involves a whole host of other institutions in addition to the Museum, from the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) to the University of Edinburgh. The initial goal is to sample and sequence the genomes of all 66,000 species of plants, fungi, protozoa and animals that are found in the UK. This will then feed into the Earth BioGenome Project, which has an ambitious aim to sequence the genomes of all life on Earth. It is hoped that this information could help researchers investigate a range of questions, from how and when certain groups or species colonised the British Isles to the evolution of wasp venom or how salamanders are able to regenerate their limbs.

This could be of significance to both the biomedical world and the bioengineering sector, as it could allow scientists to better understand how to build entire genomes from the bottom up. But the project is also part of a longer term initiative. 'Various people have described this as "moonshot" science,' explains Gavin. 'We're not necessarily doing it for a particular purpose. 'But if you look at how sequencing the human genome unleashed a huge amount of progress in medicine and genetics research, just imagine what sequencing the genomes of a huge slice of life is going to open up in different research fields.' Tracking species you can't see Sequencing these DNA 'barcodes' - the short regions of the genome that vary enough between species to be diagnostic - of all the species that live in the UK will also be important in setting a new baseline for biodiversity assessments. For Andy Nisbet, the Evidence Programme Manager at Natural England, this could be a powerful tool in keeping track of how well they are conserving nature in England. 'We do a lot of biological surveying and monitoring of species and special sites, but that is quite difficult,' explains Andy. 'We tend to monitor groups that are easy to find and species that are easy identify - so typically taxa such as birds, butterflies, dragonflies and flowering plants. 'Other groups, such as many other invertebrates and fungi, are really difficult to find and there are very few people who can comprehensively identify them. So we're interested in using DNA and eDNA to get around that, to find and identify more species that are difficult to find.'