In a major advance for public health and for the UK’s global leadership in genomics, a £200m project involving the government, charity, researchers and four leading pharmaceutical companies, was announced today (11 September). The Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) project will become a game-changing resource accessible to the global scientific community to understand, diagnose, treat and prevent life-changing diseases such as cancer and dementia.

Better conservation and management of fish stocks is on the horizon, after the completion of the brown trout reference genome by scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators. The genome will help settle a longstanding debate about whether the physically-varied brown trout is actually a single species or several, and give insights into their ability to quickly adapt to multiple environments.

LifeLab is led by Wellcome Genome Campus Public Engagement, and brings together five of the region’s leading life science research organisations: the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the Babraham Institute, the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

A mission to map the genetic code of 60,000 British species is well underway as 150 species are in the process of having their DNA extracted and their entire genetic code read and assembled. Sanger Institute researchers and their collaborators within the Darwin Tree of Life project plan to sequence the genomes of 2,000 British species over the next two years, and then scale up to complete 60,000 species’ genomes with the next 10 years, Professor Mark Blaxter announced this week at a press briefing in New York.

The first detailed map of individual malaria parasite behaviour across each stage of its complicated life cycle has been created by scientists. Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators used advanced single-cell technology to isolate individual parasites and measure their gene activity. The result is the Malaria Cell Atlas

In the first continent-wide genomic study of malaria parasites in Africa, scientists have uncovered the genetic features of Plasmodium falciparum that inhabit different regions of the continent, including the genetic factors that confer resistance to anti-malarial drugs. This sheds new light on the way that drug resistance is emerging in different locations and moving by various routes across Africa, putting previous success in controlling malaria at risk.

Scientists have discovered that the gut-infecting bacterium Clostridium difficile is evolving into two separate species, with one group highly adapted to spread in hospitals. Researchers identified genetic changes in the newly-emerging species that allow it to thrive on the Western sugar-rich diet, evade common hospital disinfectants and spread easily. They estimated this emerging species started to appear thousands of years ago, and accounts for over two thirds of healthcare C. difficile infections.

New research has found that antibiotic-resistant strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, an opportunistic pathogen that can cause respiratory and bloodstream infections in humans, are spreading through hospitals in Europe. Certain strains of K. pneumoniae are resistant to the carbapenem antibiotics that represent the last line of defence in treating infections and are therefore regarded as extremely drug resistant (XDR).

The Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer project (www.cancerrxgene.org) has released the results of four years of intense research to power genetic research into cancer treatment worldwide. The new data set builds on the previous six years’ study, and practically doubles the volume of novel data available on the website – making it the largest public dataset of its kind in the world.

A medical student who undertook a clinical PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge has gained a top prize in the prestigious Dr Falk-Pharma/Guts UK charity national awards. Mr Henry Lee-Six won the  award for his project entitled ‘Mutational Landscape of Normal Colon’ which examined potential causes of the evolution of colon cells from normal to cancerous.