Sanger Institute targets tardigrade DNA in all-life push
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- Wellcome Sanger Institute's Tree of Life programme has sequenced 2,600 genomes to date, now processing 48 species per week — up from the 18 Professor Mark Blaxter completed over 25 years early in his career.
- Tardigrade researcher Witek Morek has collected roughly 20 of the 50 tardigrade species on the British list by sampling moss and lichen on the institute's Cambridgeshire campus, a total he calls a "huge underestimate" of actual species diversity.
- The institute's picogram input multimodal sequencing protocol extracts enough DNA from a single tardigrade (200–500 picograms) to sequence its genome, replacing an older approach that required pooling 1,000 specimens — a barrier that made rare species effectively unsequenceable.
- Tardigrade genomes are roughly 30 times smaller than the human genome, requiring less data to assemble, and some species are separated by 550 million years of evolution, making them useful for tracing biological relationships.
- Four high-quality tardigrade genomes are currently in public databases, with another 14 in progress and around 50 species awaiting sequencing in the lab's -71°C freezers.
- Researchers are targeting tardigrade survival traits — cryobiosis, anoxybiosis and anhydrobiosis — for potential applications including dry-stable vaccines and drought-resistant crops.
Why it matters: The single-specimen sequencing protocol removes a long-standing bottleneck for microscopic and rare species, letting the Tree of Life programme move toward its stated goal of sequencing all complex life — currently 2,600 genomes done, 48 added weekly. Downstream, decoding tardigrade survival mechanisms opens a concrete path to dry vaccines and drought-resistant crops, per the institute's own researchers.
