The Darwin Tree of Life Project is just one of several initiatives across the globe working towards the ultimate goal of sequencing all complex life on Earth, in a venture known as the Earth BioGenome Project. The Sanger Institute will serve as a hub for sequencing and assembling the genomes of species from the British Isles. It will collaborate with partners from a breadth of UK-wide institutions, museums and universities to identify and collect species, and then to annotate and share the genomes.

Leaders from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have signed a framework collaboration agreement, agreeing to work in partnership to help enable and improve the use of genomic technologies in monitoring dangerous bacteria in the European Union and European Economic Area.

For International Women's Day today (8 March) the Wellcome Genome Campus is celebrating its staff who lead the way in supporting equality and diversity in science. The day is being marked with its annual award for Best Practice for Supporting Equality and Diversity in Science.

Researchers have created a huge resource for investigating the biological mechanisms that cause cancer. Scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators identified the patterns of DNA damage - mutational fingerprints that represent the origins of cancer - present in over a thousand human cancer cell lines. They revealed that a major mutation pattern found in human cancer, occurred in bursts in cancer cell lines. Understanding these mutational processes could help research towards cancer prevention and treatment.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) has announced it will double its funding into world-leading heart disease research at the University of Cambridge’s BHF Centre of Research Excellence. The charity has awarded Cambridge a £6 million Research Excellence Award, so that it can expand and accelerate its pioneering work at the centre over the next five years.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute is delighted that Roser Vento-Tormo has become its latest member of Faculty in March 2018. Her research team will boost the work of the Cellular Genetics programme as it explores the cellular makeup of, and interactions between, the individual cells that make up a human body.

The WHO Technical Note details how molecular diagnostic tests using DNA or proteins can give reliable data that can complement current methods. The Technical Note considers three different laboratory contexts, each with different levels of capacities for molecular AMR testing: those with no prior experience in molecular AMR surveillance; newly established national reference laboratories (NRLs); and fully established NRLs with experience in molecular AMR surveillance.

A pioneering group of biologists, physicists and mathematical modellers in Cambridge have studied the genetic activity of over 100,000 embryonic cells to establish the molecular blueprint of mouse early embryo development. This new research provides fundamentally important information on how mammalian embryos develop during gastrulation, a key stage of development, and paves the way for new understanding of the earliest stages of life.

The results, reported in Nature Communications, give insights into how cancer evolves across the tree of life and could guide the development of new therapies.

Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute have identified almost 2,000 bacterial species living in the human gut. These species are yet to be cultured in the lab. The team used a range of computational methods to analyse samples from individuals worldwide.