![[Tree of Life] The Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme has announced ambitious plans to accelerate publication of genome notes from approximately 30 per month to 200, expanding access to research that is supporting advances in agriculture, conservation, and medicine. This significant increase will be facilitated by a new specialised workflow developed by F1000 and the Wellcome Sanger Institute for Wellcome Open Research.](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/treeoflife1-2.jpg?fit=1200%2C677&ssl=1)
Editor’s note: If we aspire to mount expeditions to new worlds and then embrace the task of characterizing and quantifying whatever life forms we find, the ability to map and understand whatever metabolic and genomic systems are in operation is important. Not only do we need to know how alien biota function, but also how they evolved – what differences and similarities they may have with the origin and evolution of life on Earth. Increasing in situ capabilities like this can allow much more preliminary analysis to be done on site – or back on Earth.
And once we have collected this information we will need to find a way to understand the totality of another world’s bioinformatics so as to understand how its biosphere and its component species operate, how they evolved, and how all of this can be compared to what happened on Earth. Is there one basic way for life to occur or many? Learning how to do this on our home world first is the best way to practice for the onslaught of alien genomics information we will eventually collect on the worlds we will one day visit.
The Tree of Life is making that first big step – seeking out genomics in places never visited before and then integrating it all together. That’s how you start to truly understand a living world – and to prepare to explore another.
[Wellcome Sanger Institute]. The Darwin Tree of Life programme, led by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, aims to sequence the genome of every findable species in the UK and Ireland. It is part of the broader Earth BioGenome Project, a moonshot for biology which brings together groups to sequence all life on earth. Each completed genome produced by the Tree of Life programme is reported in an open research genome note, enabling the international scientific community to interpret, reference, and reuse the data.
![[Tree of Life] The Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme has announced ambitious plans to accelerate publication of genome notes from approximately 30 per month to 200, expanding access to research that is supporting advances in agriculture, conservation, and medicine. This significant increase will be facilitated by a new specialised workflow developed by F1000 and the Wellcome Sanger Institute for Wellcome Open Research.](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/treeoflife.jpg?resize=780%2C438&ssl=1)
Powered by innovative open research publisher F1000, the Wellcome Open Research platform launched its Tree of Life Gateway in May 2021. Over 1,900 genome notes from researchers at universities, museums and horticultural organizations across the UK and Ireland are now included in the Gateway, including the genome sequences of the red squirrel, Eurasian river otter, and the deathwatch beetle.
To realize the Tree of Life programme’s ambition to publish and index genome notes for each of the approximately 30,000 findable UK and Irish species, a new process was developed which combines an innovative publishing workflow with robust research integrity standards.
James Cleaver, Head of Publishing at F1000, explained: “The highly structured nature of the Tree of Life genome notes created a unique opportunity to reimagine the entire publication workflow. We’ve partnered with the teams at the Wellcome Sanger Institute to design a streamlined process that combines the opportunities of new publishing technology with human expertise. That human oversight remains central to ensuring the integrity and reliability of published research. We are delighted to be helping to accelerate the impact of the genome notes and the Tree of Life programme’s genome sequencing efforts.”
The first stage of the new workflow uses computer-aided review of each submission. This records metrics on genome continuity, structural accuracy, base accuracy, functional completeness and chromosome status. These metrics are embedded directly into published articles, providing transparency for both reviewers and readers.
Following online publication and the computer-aided review, the genome notes undergo Wellcome Open Research’s post-publication open peer review process, with an invited expert reviewer or a peer reviewer panel. This combined approach, using automated benchmarking and independent human review, has been approved by indexers such as PubMed.
Professor Mark Blaxter, Head of the Tree of Life programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “The reference genomes produced here at the Sanger Institute are released to the global community to transform the way biological science is done, at pace. Genome Notes provide a rapidly-published and citeable resource that credits our collector and taxonomist collaborators as well as our genome sequencing teams. Now genome note publication will be able to better keep up with our sequencing machines.”
Astrobiology,
