Molecular Digitisation and Biodiversity Bioinformatics

Biological collections (such as herbarium and fungarium specimens) are the prescurors of modern biobanks; the defining types of taxonomic concepts; together with their associated metadata, a record of what lifeforms were found where and when; there; and increasingly, a physical reference from which molecular data can be extracted. Digitisation of specimen images and metadata, and molecular characterisation through DNA sequencing, are making historic collections newly relevant to contemporary scientific questions. Although DNA degrades with age, it is still possible to obtain significant information about the phylogenetic placement and gene content of many specimens. In this talk, Dr. Kersey will present three large-scale sequencing projects that utilise the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: the Plant and Fungal Trees of Life project, the Darwin Tree of Life project, and the Fungarium Sequencing project. He will discuss the data they are generating, the challenges these raise and the opportunities these present, and the changing role of collections in the scientific community as biodiversity science becomes a big data field.