(Press-News.org) NEW YORK, NY– Today, the Vertebrate Genome Laboratory, led by Erich Jarvis and Co-Directors Giulio Formenti and Jennifer Balacco, at The Rockefeller University, has received funding as part of Google.org's $20 million AI for Science Fund to support organizations focused on cutting-edge AI for science research. The funding has been awarded to twelve academic and nonprofit organizations around the world that are using AI to address increasingly complex problems at the intersections of various disciplines of science. The proportion awarded to Vertebrate Genome Laboratory (VGL) is $3 million. The VGL is involved with multiple international genome initiatives, including leading the Vertebrate Genomes Project and contributing to the Earth BioGenome Project.
The award supports a new AI genome project led by Erich Jarvis, Head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language, Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, and Giulio Formenti, Research Assistant Professor, to accelerate the production and analysis of high-quality genomes across Earth’s biodiversity. Jennifer Balacco, Senior Research Support Specialist, will help lead the VGL wet-lab team in these efforts to produce 150 new genomes. The Data Science Platform, led by Anthony Carvalloza, also at The Rockefeller University, will be an integral part of the project by contributing AI expertise and deep learning model development to assist in achieving the project’s goals. This project includes collaborative efforts with Ben Novak of Revive and Restore and Ayshwarya Subramanian of Cornell University, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, as well as the Wellcome Sanger Institute's Genome Reference Informatics Team in the UK led by Jo Wood.
Biodiversity is essential to life on Earth, yet its rapid loss threatens ecosystems, climate stability, and human health. Although global efforts aim to sequence the genomes of all known eukaryotic species, progress has been slowed by labor-intensive bottlenecks in accurate genome assembly. With support from Google.org, the VGL will apply AI to automate manual genome curation processes and expand genomic representation across underrepresented branches of the Tree of Life. This is expected to reduce the timing of fixing errors introduced by automated algorithms in genome assemblies from days to minutes per genome.
“We are deeply grateful to receive this prestigious award from Google.org’s AI for Science Fund and honored to be among this year’s recipients,” said Jarvis. “This support will enable discoveries that advance biodiversity conservation and medicine.”
“We will apply AI solutions to scale up the production of genomes. This will enable the generation of high-quality genomes for tens of thousands of species that were never sequenced before. We will make our tools freely available to the research community,” added Formenti.
“We are excited to collaboratively apply AI to overcome pressing bottlenecks in genomics. Reference genomes are critically needed for a wide range of scientific applications with real world impact, such as disease prevention and conservation efforts,” said Balacco.
“We are extremely enthusiastic about working with this outstanding group of collaborators to dramatically speed up the rate of high-quality genome generation. The recent advances in the capabilities of AI models, coupled with the deep expertise of our collaborators, will enable us to utilize Google’s generous support to make significant progress in the field of AI-assisted genome curation,” concludes Carvalloza.
By accelerating access to high-quality genomes at scale, the project will empower researchers worldwide and fuel new insights across conservation biology, evolutionary science, and biomedical research.
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About The Rockefeller University
The Rockefeller University is one of the world’s leading biomedical research universities and its 72 laboratories are dedicated to conducting innovative, high-quality research with one singular mission: science for the benefit of humanity. A community of 2,000 faculty, students, postdocs, technicians, clinicians, and administrative personnel work on our 16-acre Manhattan campus. Our unique approach to science has led to some of the world’s most revolutionary and transformative contributions to biology and medicine, including identifying DNA as the chemical of heredity, discovering that a virus can cause cancer, and proposing CRISPR as a gene-editing tool. During Rockefeller’s 125-year history, our scientists have won 26 Nobel Prizes, 26 Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards, and 20 National Medals of Science.
About The Vertebrate Genome Laboratory at the Rockefeller University
The Vertebrate Genome Laboratory (VGL) at the Rockefeller University is a research lab and Resource Center specializing in long-read genomic technologies and de novo reference genome assembly. An objective of the VGL is to generate at least one high-quality, phased, chromosome-level, annotated, reference genome assembly of all extant vertebrate species (~70,000) for the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), and also contribute these and other high-quality eukaryotic genomes (e.g. insects and other invertebrates, plants, fungi, protist) to the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP). The VGL consists of ~1,500 sq. ft. located on the 7th floor of the Weiss Research Building. The team is composed of 17 members, including a Director, two co-Directors, an Administrative Manager, and research members of the Bioinformatics Team, Data Production Team, and Sample Management Team. The VGL is equipped with two state of the art Pacific Biosciences Revio sequencers, four Sequel™ sequencers, one Oxford Nanopore Promethion 24 sequencer, one Bionano Genomics Saphyr™ optical mapper, and all the necessary ancillary instruments for preparing uHMW DNA, RNA, and long-read and long-range sequencing libraries.
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