Episode 4 - Genomics Futures: Life on Earth

Show notes

Speakers:
  • Federica Di Palma, Vice President of Genome British Columbia
  • Alexandra Canet, science communicator and producer of the Genomics Futures podcasts
  • Roksana Majewska, marine researcher at Nord University, in Norway
  • Maui Hudson, co director of the Te Kotahi Research Institute in New Zealand
  • Mark Blaxter, Head of the Tree of Life programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
  • Alan Dangour, Director of Climate and Health at Wellcome
  • Rasmus Grondfeldt Winther, from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Copenhagen
  • ThankGod Ebenezer Global Engagement Manager at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute.
Episode description:

In this fourth episode, we spoke with guests and speakers that attended the Understanding and Sustaining Life on Earth workshop in March 2025. We begin with an interview with workshop organisers, Professor Mark Blaxter and Dr Alan Dangour.

The podcast then continues to look at themes of bioprospecting and data sovereignty with Dr Federica Di Palma and ethics with Professor Rasmus Grondfeldt Winther and about the future of biodiversity and biomonitoring with Dr ThankGod Ebenezer.

The episode is closed by a conversation with Dr Roksana Majewska and with Professor Maui Hudson where we explored the themes evolving around restructuring degraded ecosystems and the role of indigenous knowledge in science.

Mentioned in the episode:
    • Earth BioGenome Project – a project aiming to sequence, catalog and characterise the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of ten years.
    • African BioGenome project – A coordinated pan-African effort to build capacity (and infrastructure) to generate, analyze and deploy genomics data for the improvement and sustainable use of biodiversity and agriculture across Africa.
    • Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS) – a global consortium led by the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. AEGIS aims to develop the essential science and methodology to use ancient environmental DNA (eDNA) – coupled with other ancient and modern biomolecule-based approaches – to identify important organismal associations and genetic adaptations in natural and agro-ecosystems that will improve future food security under climate change.
    • Conference of the Parties (COP) – the supreme decision-making body of an international convention
    • Benefits sharing – a concept referring to the equitable distribution of advantages derived from the use of resources, particularly in contexts like genetic resources, community projects, and environmental conservation.
    • European Reference Genome Atlas – a pan-European scientific response initiative to current threats to biodiversity with the mission to sequence reference quality genomes for all European species.
    • Onso system – a benchtop short-read benchtop DNA sequencing platform
    • Moana project – an $11 million ocean project funded by the NZ Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment. The project aims to vastly improve understanding of coastal ocean circulation, connectivity and marine heatwaves to provide information that supports sustainable growth of the seafood industry, science research efforts, iwi initiatives and how we manage our marine environments.

Transcript

Federica Di Palma 00:01
It’s not possible to do biodiversity research anymore in isolation from understanding how we collaborate with communities and how we share the benefits.

Alexandra Canet 00:12
What will the future of genomics look like in 2050?

Roksana Majewska 00:16
By 2050 what I would like to see is a situation where genomics works for the people and serves the people, not the people serving genomics.

Maui Hudson 00:26
By 2050 genomics will be as routine as weather forecast, right? But instead of predicting whether it’s going to rain, we’ll be predicting whether we are going to have a harmful algal bloom, disease outbreaks, or maybe some new invasions by foreign species.<

Alexandra Canet 00:43
Welcome to the fourth episode of the Genomics Futures podcast. Our focus today are the themes and visions that came out from the Genomics Futures workshop that looked at Sustaining Life on Earth. I’m Alexandra Canet, science communicator and producer of these podcasts, alongside my colleague, Olivia Allen, who is Head of Strategy at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

In this episode, we talked to participants from a broad range of disciplines about the workshop themes, which included conservation, rewilding, new crop production, or the impact of genomics to mitigate climate change, among other topics. We start with the organisers of the meeting, Professor Mark Blaxter from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Dr Alan Dangour from Wellcome. We asked Mark first, what were his takeaways from the workshop?

Mark Blaxter 01:36
So the workshop, in my introduction to this group of people who we’d never been in the same room before. So that was the first exciting thing I said to people in the room, treat it as an intellectual holiday. And by that I meant, didn’t mean throw reason out the window and just have fun. I meant, usually, as scientists and as political thinkers and as sociologists, we would temper all our wild ideas with yeah, but that’s not really possible, so I asked people to think as radically as they could, and I think we managed to do that. So the idea of the workshop was to think about global biodiversity genomics. Where will we be in 25 years in terms of having sequenced things? How well will we have completed the job of sequencing all of the Earth’s biodiversity. What will those data, if you like, sponsor or spark or fertilise in terms of changes in the future? So I think that the workshop was really successful in lots of ways. I think we did have an intellectual holiday. There were some wild ideas put out, some radical stances taken. We all shared a dread of the future, but the positive things were that we could see roots in which genomic information, high quality, high density, high granularity genomic information could really act as a catalyst for change in a wide area of systems.

Alexandra Canet 03:00
You just mentioned, there are some wild ideas and radical stances, any examples.

Mark Blaxter 03:06
So several times, in several different groups, we invented or reinvented since Star Trek did it first, the tricorder, which is a small handheld instrument at which you could tune to measure anything you like. And we had imaginations of tricorders that we could use that would suck in a couple of cubic metres of air and tell us what all the species were in the surrounding area. We could stick it into a plant, and the plant would then tell us about not only its alleles and its adaptation to its environment, but also the threats it was then experiencing. And it would be really nice if it was handheld, about the size of a mobile phone. That was one of the things. I mean, I think everybody dreams of having magic like that.

Alexandra Canet 03:50
I’m going to turn now to Alan. I’d like to get your thoughts and a couple of themes that came out of the workshops. But my first question would be a bit more broad. In an ideal scenario, what impact will genomics have to mitigate the effects of climate change in 2050?

Alan Dangour 04:07
I think there are some answers to that question which relate to specific instances where genomic knowledge and genomic understandings can help us resolve or respond to climate issues and mitigation and adaptation, but I think, I think we step back. It’s really important for us to think about at a bit more of a conceptual level that we cannot, given the scale of the climate crisis and the rate that things are changing and our need to act with urgency, it’s really important that all of science comes together, and all of humanity comes together to respond in a way that enables us to imagine a future. And I think at the moment, if you look at the way climate is changing and the government responses, we are way behind the curve, and that puts us in a very difficult position, in a very dangerous place. We have this unbelievable expertise and science and ability to really explore new areas and discover new things all the time. And in genomics is a really good example, and we could do that for the joy of science and the joy of understanding and the joy of discovery, but we could also use that expertise and those skills to really help us answer some of the burning questions, the questions that we really must answer for humanity.

Alexandra Canet 05:28
Also during the workshop, there seems to be an agreement that genomics could be key in improving and assuring food security in 25 years time.

Alan Dangour 05:38
The question of food security is pivotal to our futures, and we know that climate change is already having an unbelievable impact on the ability of communities, especially in low- and middle-income countries, that are experiencing climate change the most on food security and nutrition and health outcomes. And we’re seeing that in a variety of different settings and through a variety of different pathways, but it’s all pretty negative. There has been already an enormous effort from the agricultural research community to develop new crops that are resilient to climate change, that are able to grow at higher temperatures, that require less water, or indeed can survive flooding. And I think that’s a really good example of where genomics has an absolutely pivotal role to play, understanding what diversity of crops already out there, what is the total diversity of crops, understanding the features of those different varietals to respond in different ways to changing environments, and then delivering those new seeds and those new crops in a way that farmers around the world can use them.

There are real questions around access, about affordability, about ethics, about ownership, about sovereignty, that cannot be ignored. And I’ve worked with farmers in poor countries, and they’re very passionate about what they do, they can be very suspicious of external inputs and things they don’t know about. And of course, it’s their livelihood. And we’re saying, try this new seed. Honestly, it’ll be great for you. And they’re saying, but you know, the success of this crop next year is whether there’s food on the table for my children. You’re asking me to experiment with my livelihood and my family, and quite rightly, there are real issues there that need much greater discussion and much greater understanding of how we do this sort of research in an equitable manner, how we involve the communities that are most affected in the research so that they are part of the process, and they therefore have greater trust in what is being delivered.

Alexandra Canet 07:45
Functional biodiversity was another of the themes that came up during the workshop. How to rewild, restore and restructure degraded ecosystems. And I want to ask you both, what are the main challenges that you see emerging from this theme?

Mark Blaxter 08:00
Yeah, rewilding is an interesting topic, because rewilding to what? What moment in the past, or what moment in an ecosystem’s evolution are we attempting to get back to? And I think what we’re really talking about is restoring ecosystems such that it is possible for them to be self-sustaining and resilient to outside threats of change, such as climate change. And so for me, understanding how species fit together to make an ecosystem work is something that genomics can be part of understanding. Understanding the dynamics of species occurrences and diversity and interactions through space and time is something that genomics will deliver, I think, hugely in the future. One of the things we don’t know is the interchangeability of species. So in the bird schools, warbler thickets, there will have been a population of warblers and a group of different species. So how essential is it to have just those species, or would any assemblage have done? And this reconstruction, both natural and anthropogenic, reconstruction of ecosystems, is something that genomics can really help. When asking of past ecosystems, how did they put themselves together? So how? What are the rules for reconstruction of ecosystems naturally, and can we replicate those? Does it matter what species there are? Does it matter what functions those species give, or does it just matter what sorts of genetic diversity those species bring in? And we’re only just getting to that. And again, genomics is critical there, because we can use genomics in all sorts of ways to assess current ecosystems and the biodiversity and just how they are reconstructing themselves, whether it’s in ancient, rewilded places like Britain, which rewilded, or more recently, the rewilded places like the experiments that have been started over the last 50 years or so.

Alexandra Canet 09:54
So all of this you’ve been talking about is really interesting, but I’d like to know in 25 years. Will we know this? Will we be able to do this?

Mark Blaxter 10:03
Yeah, and so we will, we will have the genomes of all the species that are of interest and are of potential interest, and we will also have an idea of what the functional genes in those genomes are that are of interest. So in a marine system, it might be, we’re really interested in who can photosynthesize, and how well do they photosynthesize at different depths and light intensities. And so we would just be looking at the photosynthetic organisms and just at their photosynthetic genes. So I think we’ll be in a position where it’s really data driven, and it’ll be all sorts of microassay tools maybe attach your mobile phone, which allow you to read the DNA that’s floating in the air, or the DNA that’s floating in the water, and ask an explicit question, are the right photosynthesizers here? Is this tree canopy full of leaf miners, but there are no leaf eating, or there are no bark boring beetles and so is the ecosystem less robust than we might think.

Alexandra Canet 11:04
Equity kept coming up during the workshop, and in fact, it’s a recurring theme throughout all six Genomics Futures workshops. But for you, what does equity mean in this context?

Alan Dangour 11:15
Well, I mean, at Wellcome, we’re very clear now that equity is critical, fundamental to what we’re trying to achieve, science, equity and health, the science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone is our mission. We’re moving into a world where we need to think very carefully about who, who’s taking part in this research, who’s defining the research, and who benefits from the research. And I think we as a philanthropy have a particular role to play, and we can do that. We can decide our own fate, as it were, and where we want to spend our funding and what we’re trying to achieve. And we recognise that there is enormous inequity on the planet, both in terms of ability to do science, but also in health outcomes and well being outcomes. What is the best approach to doing that? but also domestically, how can we rebalance some of that inequity? So we know, for example, that black and Pakistani and Bangladeshi researchers in the UK do less well applying to Wellcome. We now have a fund specifically for those researchers to enable them to get a Wellcome award and then progress their research careers and in the climate and health programme, for example, we’re about to make major investments in new centres of research and policy for climate and health in Africa, because we recognise that it’s not right that we define all the research questions sitting on Euston Road in London, we should be asking communities and scientists based in the most vulnerable parts of the world to be asking the questions themselves and to be coming up with the solutions that are fit for the context in which they live.

Mark Blaxter 12:54
Yeah! So Alan has a very much the funders view. It’s awesome to hear Wellcome moving its ship. I mean, the course of Wellcome travels through the seas of sciences is very hard to change course, so watching it change course is absolutely essential. So in terms of genomics and equity, there’s two pieces there. One is, I think we have to, in the next phase of the Earth BioGenome Project, and over the next decade, really focus on capability and capacity in nations which traditionally haven’t delivered genomes. So what’s really positive is that South America is organising itself, and there’s a set of projects already existing and a nascent network. The Africa BioGenome Project is absolutely leading the way in, they’ve had 1000s of people through their training workshops. We’re looking for a Southeast Asia network to start itself. But I think our role, then, in my current position at the Tree of Life at the Science Institute will Yes, be to push the science forward and do the best we possibly can, but spending more time supporting those institutions, which is to help them build capacity and capability.

Alexandra Canet 14:17
Climate change and crop production were topics that took centre stage during this workshop, as both Alan and Mark have reflected on multiple times, another theme that was also prominent was bioprospecting, and we spoke about this with Dr Federica Di Palma, Chief Scientific Officer at Genome British Columbia.

Federica Di Palma 14:36
Well, I think that by 2050 genomics is going to be foundational to allow us to unlock nature’s potentials, and I think even now at 2025 in ways that perhaps we’re not fully realising or imagining, but we know, we do know now, that there is a potential to discover new enzymes. That will help us recycle waste to create a climate resilience crop, in particular as I am talking to you from Canada, from British Columbia, forestry bio products that will be able to replace plastics and fossil fuels, all of these. It’s an immense treasure, really, for discovery and synthetic biology will, as a scientific discipline, enable us to design new materials and new medicines, you know, which are really inspired by the biodiversity, the original biodiversity,

Alexandra Canet 15:32
The role of local, indigenous communities, was a topic that kept coming up, and I would like to ask you, are there any examples of good practice in this area that you could tell us, perhaps from Canada or perhaps from other parts of the world?

Federica Di Palma 15:47
There are a few examples and benefit sharing. We’ve been talking about this for a while within the context of biodiversity. This was at the centre of the last COP Conference of the Parties at 2015 that was held in Colombia. I think that there aren’t many mechanisms available. Now there have been proposed mechanisms of sharing benefits that we may use from the genetic resources that were used through our research. And there are some companies, some nonprofits, and there are some NGOs that have begun to build this, some ways to return benefits to communities, and are doing this very successfully. There isn’t really a standard to do this just yet. There’s been proposed mechanisms globally. We have to see how this shapes out. Canada as a Western country, which is incredibly resource rich and has a very active First Nation community that there aren’t mechanisms in Canada either that are very well understood to return benefits, and it’s something that we are all very aware and working on at this moment in time. In British Columbia, we are actually working very closely with the local, indigenous community and First Nations on the issues of data sovereignty, and we bring a lot of attention in our day to day work on genomics and advancing genomics on governance models that address the perspective of the First Nations. By the way, I should probably add that benefit sharing is a very broad terminology. We have different kinds of benefit sharing. We have monetary benefit sharing and non-monetary benefit sharing. But I think there are great examples of programmes across the globe right now that have done very well with the non monetary benefit sharing, and that is really what the capacity building, the training, the exchange of information, as well as exchange of skill sets. And there is a legacy, I would say, particularly in the academic community, of this sharing of non-monetary benefits. But let’s not forget that indigenous and local communities still also are interested in monetary benefits to be shared with them because they are also interested in using the biodiversity to build their own economic value and livelihoods in their community. It’s not possible to do biodiversity research anymore in isolation from understanding how we collaborate with communities and how we share the benefits.

Alexandra Canet 18:24
Absolutely, and that was a beautiful statement there. At the end Federica, in all my notes during the workshop, there seemed to be an agreement that genomics could be key in ensuring food security. And I think this is a very pressing issue. What do we need to take into account? And what are your thoughts on this? Looking at 25 years in the future.

Federica Di Palma 18:45
I think it’s quite clear now. I think the agri food sector is very advanced when it comes to genomics, and there is no doubt that we have many examples on how genomics has helped us develop climate resilience and nutrient fortified crops. And in Canada, for example, in British Columbia in particular, we are using genomic to improve our crops like wheat, but also berries, and of course, even tree fruits, right? And particularly, we are looking now at not just adaptation resilience to diseases, but we are looking at adapting to the changing climate. In order to deliver food security, we really need strong policies on sustainable farming, on respect for local and indigenous knowledge again, and also we need policies that address equitable access to the technology themselves. You asked me particularly, where we are going to be in 2050, science will need to continue to evolve, but there needs to be now a real focus on dialogue and consultation that is interdisciplinary, and then bring this technology and this scientist close to people that make policy and really understand regulatory mechanisms and frameworks that are needed.

Alexandra Canet 20:13
And what would you say would be the steps to achieve equity?

Federica Di Palma 20:17
I would just say, in 25 years, the equity is just not an afterthought, but it’s built into science and into the way academia and industry operate. Practically, what that might mean to me as this genomic scientist is open access to genomic data and tools, obviously. It means, as we’ve been talking in the global stage since the Conference of the Party COP16 is benefit sharing agreements, the return value, whether that is monetary value or non-monetary value, to the indigenous people and local community. There was a global fund that was proposed. So we need to see how this global funding model so will evolve and will be implemented. And most and foremost, we need to ensure that these global funding models don’t, as always, just favour the wealthy countries.

Alexandra Canet 21:17
Dr Rasmus Gronfeld Winter, a philosopher of science and Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Copenhagen University, was another attendee at the workshop. We asked him, in an ideal scenario, what would genomics do for all of us in 2050?

Rasmus Gronfeld Winter
If I had to summarise this, I mean, that’s obviously a big question, we are going to have made quite a bit of progress in ways we can’t even imagine right now about the technical matters with genomics and I would argue, because it’s almost always this way, historically, things that we thought were within our reach are probably still not going to be even remotely within our reach. So we’re both going to make surprising progress we can’t predict now, but we’re also going to not be making progress that we think we can make now, that’s at the technical level. At the social or political level, we’re up against a lot of challenges. We’re up against severe climate change. We’re against a severe loss of biodiversity. We’re against civil unrest, wars, food insecurity, water insecurity, it is a significant and long list that we simply can’t afford to keep ignoring. And I think this is also relevant for genomics, because in the genomics case, we want to make progress, but we have to make it within the constraints and the parameters of what the social realities on the ground might look like. We also have to reflect on what is our role as scientists and as politicians. And you asked me, What’s the ideal scenario? I do think there could be some very cool and wonderful things coming out of genomics. For example, if there’s still something left to conserve nature wise, I would believe we would really have some very strong and powerful tools for identifying, taxonomizing, classifying, estimating population numbers of different species. So we will be able to classify different species in an area, and we will be able to predict from the data we have on environmental DNA, for example, how many individuals of a certain species are there here, or when were they last here? I do think there’s going to be some pretty impressive breakthroughs there.

Alexandra Canet 23:44
And what are your thoughts on what genomics will be able to do for agriculture and for sustaining the human population in 25 years time?

Rasmus Gronfeld Winter 23:53
At the moment, I have the professorship at University of California, Santa Cruz, and one at University of Copenhagen, and the one at University of Copenhagen is primarily involved with being the chair of the ethics advisory board for a project to look at ancient environmental DNA sampled from across the world had some of the ethical issues because what land is It being sampled from? And what rights do the people have from which land they’re being sampled from? What if something very profitable gets discovered from a sample in Greenland or a sample in Iran, who benefits? What are the agreements there? What are the ethical commitments? Who owes what to whom? Those are very, very important questions to have. The whole hope of this project is to find genes that when inserted into barley, wheat, rice or maize, four of the biggest carbohydrate crops on the planet, will increase productivity, and there’s already some promising early results of increasing yield to a very significant amount that makes crop experts sit up in their chairs. I think with projects like AEGIS, that’s the name of the project, the whole point of AEGIS is to try to find genes that will increase productivity, sustainability, drought resistance, resistance to pests, so that we can reduce pesticides, etc, etc. It is important to keep in mind that genomics is just part of the puzzle. We need more things like organic farming, multi cropping, silviculture. I know many people are in one camp and then not in the other. But in a way, what all this family of alternative forms of agriculture shares is kind of pardon the pun, a resistance to monocrop agriculture. And I think genomics, together with alternative and more locally specialised forms of agriculture, is going to be a game changer. But again, it’s a guess. No one has the crystal ball, and all of us, even the biggest experts, have, time and time again, been shown to be wrong.

Alexandra Canet 26:24
So you just mentioned there that you’re on the ethics Advisory Board of the AEGIS project, and you were commenting on a set of questions. Can you give us some ideas of what you think could be the right answers?

Rasmus Gronfeld Winter 26:37
There’s no doubt that people really care about these questions, questions about equity. Who benefits from this kind of project brings up a lot of ethical issues. There’s a lot of wealth inequality in the world. There’s a lot of power inequality in the world. Big science projects nowadays are unfortunately no exception to that. So what are some of the right answers? I think there could be a more honest, upfront level of commitment and attention to what it is that the people from which one is taking the samples. And a lot of times it’s indigenous peoples, not always, but a lot of times it is indigenous people asking them for what they want. What do they want to get out of this? What do they think is part of a reasonable scientific process and knowledge sharing process? But frankly, what is also part of a profit making process? What are, what is the benefit sharing that people want? And I think their scientists and these kind of big research projects really have a lot of work to do, and I do think we will do better, and I think that’s part of where we will be in 2050.

Alexandra Canet 28:03
Next for this podcast, we spoke with Dr ThankGod Ebenezer, Global Engagement Manager at the European Bioinformatics Institute and one of the main sponsors of the African BioGenome Project. He was part of a group reflecting on the future of biodiversity and biomonitoring. Thankgod. Thank you for talking to us today. And my question for you to start would be, in an ideal scenario, what will genomics do for you and the people around you in 2050?

ThankGod Ebenezer 28:32
So to clearly answer your question is that in the next 25 years, we expect to, for instance, be able to understand our environment has been more coordinated progress within the biodiversity space, more recently, through some of the efforts in the Earth BioGenome Project, African BioGenome Project and the European Reference Genome Atlas, at last, so that’s one we expect that It would hopefully be mainstreamed into the everyday activities, whether it be in how we conserve species, on food security, on food systems, and ultimately help in research and innovation at the local level. For instance, how do we integrate this into curriculums in institutions, and how can it become mainstream for how research is done, and also how all the kind of things that are taught at the molecular level in academic and research settings.

Alexandra Canet 29:28
You were part of the group that looked at biodiversity and biomonitoring during the workshop, and I remember that the theme that came out was that in 2050 you would have generated data of every organism on Earth, but I also recall there were several challenges. Could you tell us about them?

ThankGod Ebenezer 29:48
So there are several challenges. There are technical challenges and there are non-technical challenges, ultimately challenges in the policy area and ethics and legal and social. For instance, should we sequence all organisms? Right? I think that is one question, because sometimes we know things are good to do, but are they always right to do it? Should we be the ones to sequence these things, or can it be done by the locals and then at the local level, they can contribute to the global scientific ecosystem. So with the technical challenges, for instance, how do we sequence species using, for instance, low maintenance instruments and infrastructure, right? So to be able to carry out a genome sequencing effort, you need to have millions of pounds on the table, then that completely shuts off people who do not have this high amount of money. That is one. And what that also means is that competes with what the priority should be. Another thing is about 60%, 65%, or 70% of the challenges that we see in the technical aspect of genomics ultimately comes down to the pre-analytical steps. One question is, how do you analyse the same data here in Hinxton as you would in Peru, right and get the same result at the same temperature, of the variations in temperature and stuff like that, right? So if we can stabilise that pre-analytical step, or ultimately knock off the pre-analytical steps in genomics such that it is unified and consistent and optimised, then that ultimately helps to democratise the system.

Alexandra Canet 31:41
I believe you are involved in the African BioGenome Project, and it did come up as a good example of equitable partnerships during the workshop. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

ThankGod Ebenezer 31:53
When I started the project, one of the things I did, I spent 18 months to have like a stakeholder engagement, try to listen to the people, and in doing so, two things were clear. One is that they don’t want to be sample collectors. Then two, they want to be able to ensure that such a project is not the same as projects that they’ve seen previously, you know, where we say, okay, we’re going to do XYZ, and then after a few years, it might be done, but the people are left out, or the people are not carried on. So this engagement shaped how we engineered the African BioGenome Project, and then it led us to try to speak in a language that the people understand, and to try to have a common, unified framework for the people, to give a clear example of such equitable partnerships when we go out to institutions to work with them, to invest in sequencing genomes from their regions. When such genome is published and uploaded, for instance, to a database, it is not Africa BP name that is in the database. We’re not the submitter. We ensure that we work with the institution to submit the data, and that is quite different from what we see, we support you in a concept, but that singular act of submitting this data will be done by you, and we have found that that alone helps build trust.

Alexandra Canet 33:30
And was there anything missing from the conversation?

ThankGod Ebenezer 33:35
There were lots of interesting ideas, that were shared, but I felt that the workshop could address the urgency required to sequence more genomes at scale, mainly leveraging on the current technologies that we have, and seeing how do we make them better quite early or in the medium term and use it to deliver the sequencing efforts at scale. So an example is this. We do know that high maintenance infrastructure is very challenging when it comes to sequence. You have to have a lot of resources and funds to do that. At the same time, we do know that the majority of the biodiversity are in regions that do not have the high maintenance infrastructure. So if, by thinking about this, it tells me that we need a system that is easy to maintain, portable and we can move around quite easily. So I would have, I had expected that the discussion could zoom in a bit into those kind of challenges, right? Though, it did, in a way, because there were things around, discussions around, can we have sequenced genomes by taking a photo of an organism, then it gives you the genetics, the whole DNA sequence, yeah, but that is a long way ahead, so you might need a lot of things to actually get there. So I said that, okay, given that we’ve made progress in saying, like the current technologies, right? How do we work with the industry players to reduce the genome sequencing cost? We could say Oxford Nanopore is portable. It can be moved around to how do we make it better? We could say, okay, PacBio gives high quality. It’s higher up there when it comes to quality. But how do we reduce the cost and make it smaller? An example is that they have the Onso system that is portable. Since they have it, how do we get it to the people. How do we make the current technologies better, bring down the course, make it portable and make it accessible to people who really need it?

Alexandra Canet 35:55
To finalise this podcast, we spoke to Dr Roksana Majewska, marine biologist from Nord University and Professor Maui Hudson, co director of the Te Kotahi Research Institute, we paired up Maui and Roxanna to talk about functional biodiversity, restructuring degraded ecosystems and the role of indigenous knowledge in science. But first we asked them about their visions for 2050.

Maui Hudson 36:22
So I think in 2050 if I was thinking about it from my indigenous community, what they might do with genomics, it would be really something that supports the aspirations which they’ve got in their area. So being involved with managing the environment and the different ways in which genomics might help that thinking about how it can deal with pest incursions, sorts of activities around restoration of particular species, which we would call Tonga species, but indigenous plants that have been degraded. And then some of the commercial activities we’re involved in, in the marine environment, and being able to use genomics to support the breeding programmes associated with that. So what I’d say is, there’s lots of potential, but it only gets realised if they’re able to wield it for their own kind of purposes.

Roksana Majewska 37:12
Well, it’s, I think it’s similar in a way, of course, but I imagine that by 2050, genomics will be as routine as weather forecast, right? But instead of predicting whether it’s going to rain, we’ll be predicting whether we are going to have a harmful algal bloom, disease outbreaks, or maybe some new invasions by foreign species, right? So in short, we could say that by 2050 it’s going to be a better forecast, smarter restoration and fewer nasty surprises. And because I’m based in Northern Norway, right? So technically in the Arctic, and I work with microbes, and especially marine microbes, and here in the Arctic, fishing is very important, and I guess genomics can also help with that. It can help with not only restoration, but also providing sustainable and trustworthy food sources. So I imagine that we are going to have some sort of real time ocean health dashboard, right where we have autonomous samplers that will stream EDNA and metagenomic weeds to the cloud, and we’re going to watch plankton community shifts pathogens and invasive species in maybe near real time, right? And that could be vital for aquaculture and fishers, especially in the Arctic, we are going to have some sort of early warnings for coastal communities. So genomic signatures could flag the harmful algal blooms, the fish diseases, and it could be days to weeks earlier. So it would not only help scientists understand what’s happening, but it could actually also help the farmers and the fishermen to adjust the stock densities, maybe deploy cages deeper, or maybe halt harvesting right when you have harmful bloom, and we are going to know about this, maybe before the toxins are already in the environment.

Alexandra Canet 39:22
And Roksana, I’d be interested to know, what challenges do you see in terms of marine life within this functional biodiversity theme?

Roksana Majewska 39:31
I guess when we think about restoration on land, we imagine that we would be planting trees. This is very simplified, but especially in the ocean, it should probably be more thinking about the functions and connectivity between the species rather than a single species, right? And then we can focus on keystone species, but maybe especially in case of the ocean, do we really understand which species are the keystone species? Then that’s, of course, always within a certain context, because the species that’s a key species now it doesn’t have to be the key species tomorrow. We also have a lot of hidden diversity, which also means hidden functions, because in the ocean, we have different dimensions and organisms moving both horizontally and vertically, right? There’s a lot of stratification, and a lot of that is still not explored. We cannot even explore the species in the same way as if they were on the surface or on land, because a lot of the species are going to be affected by us sending them right? So if we take a deep sea organism to the surface and we record some sort of stress, we will never know that it’s actually the stress the organism experiences in the place the organism lives, or the stress that we caused by sudden change of temperature and pressure. So do we understand what healthy marine environment looks like? And this is also something that genomics could perhaps help us understand better through the ancient DNA that we can recover from the sediments and reconstruct the past climates and past conditions.

Alexandra Canet 41:18
And shifting the topic a little bit. Maui, in your perspective, I’m very interested to understand your thoughts on the role of indigenous knowledge in genomics. Where is it now? And where would you like it to be in 2050? How can we integrate indigenous knowledge into the scientific pipeline?

Maui Hudson 41:33
I think there’s a lot of places where it could be integrated, but it’s a pretty tricky question, because when we talk about indigenous knowledge in these sorts of contexts, we sort of think about it like it’s a single thing, and it’s a little bit like saying, can we integrate science into this pipeline? And the answer is obviously yes, but you know which bit of science and for what purpose, along what kind of part of the path. When does it make sense to integrate indigenous knowledge as it relates to maybe the best place to do sampling, or some sort of understanding of a particular dynamic that happens in a certain location, which gives you some sort of unique phenomena to explore? It could relate to different sorts of values around the process of how you do things, or knowledge about when certain species are in certain places at different times, all these sort of observational data that’s been kind of collected and embedded, that has a usefulness to certain types of questions, and then extending beyond that into other parts along the pathway. And I think this is where that equity question comes up, in relation to the handoff from science into sort of commercialisation opportunities or other use spaces, is often a point where those communities are dropped off. So the ability to participate across the whole lifecycle is something which a lot of communities are expressing now.

Alexandra Canet 43:01
Could you give us some examples where this is working in a positive way?

Maui Hudson 43:06
Ah, yeah, there’s all sorts of examples. Certainly, when we worked on the Moana project, our community Whakatōhea worked with a range of science groups, helping them with identifying sampling sites, working with other tribes throughout the region to get into the sampling sites in those places, worked with them around some new sensors that were being developed, and participated in naming those sensors. I hosted members of the research community in our community, and supported them with sort of language and engagement protocols. There’s a whole sort of range of different contributions that were made across the course of the project.

Alexandra Canet 43:46
Climate change was this massive topic that kept coming up during the workshop. Any ideas on how genomics could better help us prepare for a warming planet?

Roksana Majewska 43:57
We could definitely get better at detecting rain shifts that we could act on so the eDNA detected across the oceans and along the coast could flag and track moving species, for example, various important fish stocks, and that could guide flexible quotas and support sustainable and fair fisheries, right? We could also find the tough strains or lineages or populations that could survive in the changing world, right, that could be less influenced by the rising temperature. So we do something like that here in Norway. We select different strains of kelps that could survive in higher temperature, the early warning system for diseases and blooms. We could use microbes as Sentinel species, because microbes react first. However, we are still not good at detecting those changes. So what I would like to see in the future is that we are more knowledgeable when it comes to microbes and their functions. And of course, I’m not saying that microbes are going to save us, but collectively, microbes do have a very interesting and almost unlimited array of functions that we could use to engineer the environments. So you we could seed certain habitats with microbes to add the missing functions. And microbes do work 24/7, so they are very, very efficient.

Maui Hudson 45:43<
It’s like, like, biological nanobots or something.

Roksana Majewska 45:45
Yes.

Alexandra Canet 45:46
Maui, Roxanna, anything else that came out during the workshops that you’d like to add.

Roksana Majewska 45:53
Whatever we want to do to improve lives on this planet, we need to do it within international frameworks, right? And I think this is actually the biggest challenge, because, as we can see, especially now, there is very little understanding, even when it comes to maybe much more straightforward issues, and without global collaborations, I don’t see how we will be able to efficiently collect the data, analyse the data, interpret the data, and then also make some decisions and actually take some action to implement the solutions.

Maui Hudson 46:35
No, this isn’t actually a disagreement. I think it is important to think about these issues like an international framework. But I think that also doesn’t mean that it’s homogenised. And just like in the environment where diversity contributes to a really sort of resilient and functioning environment, we need different types of diversity within our data infrastructures and systems which should all be connected and networked, and just like different things are in the environment, but they have to deal with different issues that are arising, or different kind of ecosystems are having to deal with. So we have indigenous communities because of some of the historical experiences, have a different way of wanting to engage in and often that might seem to be standing apart a bit as they’re trying to develop a little bit of autonomy in their own sort of pathway, but it leads to engagement in different sorts of ways, and I think that’s where some of the equity questions come up about where we direct our funding. And genomics gets a significant amount of funding across that kind of whole spread of activities that could take place.

Alexandra Canet
Thank you for listening to the fourth episode of the Genomics Futures podcast. If you haven’t listened to the first three episodes of the series yet, you can find them wherever you get your podcast under Genomics Futures

In our next podcast, we will explore the insights and topics that emerged during the ‘New Ways to Achieve and Deliver Impact’ workshop. The event gathered a rich diversity of researchers, and  looked at a myriad of themes, including AI and changes to data generation, the opportunities that wearable technologies bring and how new organisational models can help advance life sciences research.

If you want to get in touch, please, do you might agree, disagree, or have your own thoughts about the topics and themes discussed in these conversations. We’d love to hear them. You’ll get in touch with us at genomicsfutures@sanger.ac.uk.

Genomics Futures Workshops

Wellcome and the Wellcome Sanger Institute invited scientists from around the world to look towards the future to imagine the new opportunities presented by genomics research