It’s a little after 6:30 on a brisk July morning in a stone hut high in the Italian Alps. A gently hissing wood fire is leaking some warmth out of a brick oven. Gathered near it, around a big wooden table, some of Europe’s brightest young lepidopterists are doing what they do best: arguing in Spanish, Italian, and English about moths.
The Alte Pforzheimer Hütte, a stone house originally built in 1901, served as a base camp for the lepidopterists hunting rare moths in the Italian Alps. Luigi Avantaggiato
Scattered across the top of the table are dozens of moths in plastic specimen jars, the harvest of the previous night’s trapping. At one end of the table, Gioele Moro of the Czech Academy of Sciences is gently prying loose moths from the depths of a trap. At the other end, Laura Torrado-Blanco of the University of Oviedo’s entomological collection is paging through Lepidoptera guide books. She’s using the books to identify species—up here at 2,300 meters, there is no Internet connection.
A few of the scores of moths captured on a single night at a site in the Italian Alps are lined up on a bench in the stone hut. Researchers will identify the moths’ species and some of the insects will be sent on for tissue sampling and eventual genome sequencing. Luigi Avantaggiato
Looking up from a book, she notices me noticing the big butterfly tattoo on her left arm. “Chapman’s ringlet,” she tells me. “Erebia palarica,” she adds reflexively.
Pep Lancho Silva, a doctoral student at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, extends a finger toward me with a spectacular creature on it: a large bone-white moth, with a black head and big black splotches on its wings. Torrado-Blanco is pretty sure it’s Arctia flavia, a species of tiger moth found only in rarefied air. If so, it’s precisely the kind of insect they came up here, to this chilly hut on the edge of a crystalline Alpine pond, to capture.
A yellow tiger moth, Arctia flavia, is among the catch at the stone hut, at an altitude of 2,300 meters.
At the crack of dawn in the stone hut, researchers [from left] Eric Toro Delgado, Laura Torrado-Blanco, Mónica Doblas-Bajo, and Gioele Moro (standing) unpack and examine the moths captured during the previous night. Luigi Avantaggiato
Lepidopterists have trapped, identified, and classified moths and butterflies for centuries. But this high-altitude confab is no Victorian perambulation. It’s a vital component of a sprawling, cutting-edge project that is pushing the boundaries of bioinformatics and the tools of modern genomics. These researchers are taking part in the first international field expedition of Project Psyche, whose goal is to sequence the genomes of all 11,000 species of moths and butterflies in Europe. Psyche is part of a larger effort, the Darwin Tree of Life project, which is itself a component of arguably the most ambitious science project of all time: the Earth BioGenome Project. Its goal is to sequence the genomes of all of Earth’s roughly 1.8 million organisms—every named species of animal, plant, fungus, and microbe that’s made up of cells that have a nucleus.
None of these hugely ambitious efforts would be conceivable without the enormous advances in genome sequencing and bioinformatics over the past couple of decades. The cost and speed of sequencing an individual genome have declined to the point where it’s now possible to batch process multiple genomes in a single day and for less than US $1,000 apiece. And the revolutions in biotech that have made such a feat possible are still gathering steam. Indeed, Earth BioGenome officials freely admit that their bold goal—to sequence those 1.8 million named species by 2035—won’t be possible without a hundredfold decrease in the time and cost of sequencing.
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