Café Sci Cambridge: The Darwin Tree of Life Project

Wed 13 March 2019

Espresso Library

The Darwin Tree of Life Project is a collaboration between the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) and many other institutions. Contributing to the Earth BioGenome Project which aims to sequence the genomes of all life on Earth, this initiative will focus solely on UK biodiversity. By sequencing the genomes of every single species that lives in the UK, researchers hope to delve deeper into their evolutionary history, track changes that have occurred over the last few centuries and even inform biomedicine, agriculture and conservation priorities in new ways.

Tim Littlewood is Head of the Department of Life Sciences Department at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London. He is responsible for botanical, entomological and zoological collections and research within the Department. His personal research has focussed on molecular tools to understand species diversity and diversification, particularly on helminth parasites that infect vertebrates. The NHM is home to 80 millions natural history specimens collected from across the globe over hundreds of years. They are pivotal for systematics and taxonomy, and to understand biodiversity, evolution and change through time. Genomic technologies offer the opportunity to unlock such collections further and to be able to use the past and present to inform the future.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

Cost: Free