Tree of Life

26 March 2026
Studying soil’s unsung heroes
In this blog, we hear from Wellcome Sanger Institute PhD student James McCulloch about his favourite invertebrates, the springtails, and their extraordinary cryptic diversity.

29 July 20257.4 min read
Studying intracellular parasite DNA is like panning for gold
PhD Student Amjad Khalaf shares how his research on microsporidia is creating new high-quality genomes to help better understand how they cause, and sometimes prevent, disease.

14 September 20238.5 min read
1,000 species get their genomes sequenced for the first time
A thousand reference genomes of the highest quality have now been produced for diverse eukaryotic species across the tree of life.
3 August 20236.9 min read
New Tree of Sex project collects all the wild ways nature reproduces
From sex-changing fish to asexual lizards, these and many more species will be captured in a new sex database made possible by the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s powerful genomic resources.
21 June 20235.3 min read
A barcoding buzz
Sanger researchers are involved in large-scale projects that aim to revolutionise how we monitor and understand global biodiversity – starting with insects. But some of their work is starting closer to home, working with schools and local communities to monitor insect biodiversity across Cambridgeshire and Essex.
8 December 202210.4 min read
Software to sort samples and sequence species at scale
Meet the software developers, informaticians and bioinformaticians who are helping to sequence the DNA of all life on earth.
8 December 20227.4 min read
Brazil, bats and GoaT
Find out about Genomes on a Tree (or GoaT) database, which will hold data for the hundreds of thousand of species that are currently having their genomes sequenced for the first time.
9 November 202217.1 min read
Sequencing anything, anytime, anywhere
We talk to Physilia Chua about her work to monitor biodiversity and make DNA sequencing more accessible.