The biosphere, the zone in which life on Earth is found, contains an estimated 10 million multicellular species. But perhaps the most surprising fact about life on Earth is how little we know about its diversity. Only 2 million species are known to science — organisms that have been studied in sufficient detail to at least be described, classified and given a scientific name. With at least another 8 million species yet to be discovered, cataloguing the diversity of life is in many ways a moonshot — a vast endeavour that succeeds by bringing together specialists across many disciplines.
The bewildering diversity of life on Earth has meant that developing a system to catalogue species has been painstakingly slow. Traditionally, species discovery and taxonomy has been the purview of field biologists who laboriously observe, collect and classify organisms across the planet’s frigid poles to its temperate and tropical zones. In recent years, however, the power of DNA sequencing coupled with the ability to identify species using only short stretches of their DNA has transformed the field of biodiversity.
This revolution — a DNA barcoding system that uses a small DNA fragment to discriminate species — not only promises to complete the catalogue of life, but it will generate important insights into the age of species and their relationships. Known as BIOSCAN, this multinational, multidisciplinary project to complete the inventory of species, reveal their interactions, and assess their response to ecosystem change is led by Professor Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph who holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Molecular Biodiversity.
Professor Hebert and his international team of co-principal investigators and co-applicants have just received $24 million from Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund to expand the scope of the BIOSCAN project, the largest research program ever undertaken in biodiversity science.
Among the dozens of researchers on this ambitious project are Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Lila Kari and M. Tamer Özsu.
L
to
R:
Professors Lila
Kari
and
M.
Tamer
Özsu
Lila
Kari,
Professor
and
University
Research
Chair
at
the
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science,
is
author
of
more
than
200
peer-reviewed
articles.
She
is
one
of
the
world’s
experts
in
biomolecular
computation
—
using
biological,
chemical
and
other
natural
systems
to
perform
computations.
M.
Tamer
Özsu,
a
University
Professor
at
the
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science,
is
a
Fellow
of
the
Royal
Society
of
Canada,
a
Fellow
of
the
American
Association
for
the
Advancement
of
Science,
a
Fellow
of
the
Association
for
Computing
Machinery,
and
a
Fellow
of
the
Institute
of
Electrical
and
Electronics
Engineers.
His
research
centres
on
large-scale
data
distribution
and
management
of
non-relational
data.
Professor Kari, a co-applicant on the BIOSCAN project, brings her expertise in biodiversity informatics and AI to develop efficient machine learning algorithms that extract compositional information from both structured and unstructured genomic data, towards BIOSCAN’s main goal and other underlying applications.
As a co-principal investigator, University Professor Özsu brings his expertise in data science to the informatics team that will develop the next-generation data management tools to manage the large and varied data BIOSCAN will collect as well as data engineering tools and methodologies to prepare the data for analysis and exploration.