Format: ORAL

Michelle L. Hart, Laura L. Forrest

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland

The Darwin Tree of Life project has the ambitious goal of producing reference quality genomes of all eukaryotic species in Britian and Ireland. Within this broader goal, the botanical aim is to collect 1900 species of land plant from Britain and Ireland and produce reference genomes from over half of these species by the end of 2024. In building such a large scale reference genome resource, considerable attention has been given to standard operating procedures and protocols. This involves work undertaken by Genome Acquisition Laboratories (GALs) at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and includes developing target species lists, defining and adhering to comprehensive meta-data standards, collection of plants directly snap frozen on dry-ice or liquid nitrogen in the field, and then using DNA barcoding to check species identify, and undertaking genome size estimates with flow-cytometry to guide sequencing efforts. High quality plant tissues are then submitted to the Wellcome Sanger institute for DNA extractions and genome sequencing using a combination of PacBio Hifi sequencing for the main assembly and scaffolding with HiC. In this presentation I will give an overview of botanical progress on the Darwin Tree of Life project, summarising achievements (including the successful sequencing of the 90 gb mistletoe genome) and also the challenges including the multitude of difficulties that arise when from working with diverse tissues sources and often very small amounts of starting material.