Some of the world's best scientists gathered last May 15 in Barcelona with a crazy idea on the table: study each species of living being, cell by cell, to complete an atlas capable of illuminating the evolution of life on Earth and the origin of phenomena such as human thinking and diseases. The idea, apparently unfathomable and crazy, arose in the head of Arnau Sebé Pedros, a biologist born 37 years ago in the Lleida town of La Fuliola. He studies cells, but his true passion is ornithology. He lives it with obsession. He travels to exotic places and tries to see absolutely every species of bird, even if he has to spend a week chasing a nondescript brown bird. That totalizing ambition could explain his determination to create what he has called “the Cellular Atlas of Biodiversity.”
Sebé Pedrós works at the Center for Genomic Regulation, in front of Barcelona's Somorrostro beach, a place occupied by shanties until 1966 and today headquarters of Half a dozen of cutting-edge scientific institutes. The biologist's office is small and sober. Three jellyfish, called Gary, Gerry and Cherry, they go up and down in a circular fish tank. Sitting in front of them, the researcher proclaims that his project is no longer an unattainable dream. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundationestablished in the Californian city of Palo Alto by the co-founder of Intel and his wife, has just invested 3.6 million euros to start the initiative.
Sebé Pedrós already It was world news in September. His team analyzed cell by cell the four known species of placozoans, strange animal creatures shaped like tiny pancakes. They are marine organisms of just one millimeter, with about 50,000 cells each, which separated from the human group 800 million years ago. The meticulous work of Sebé Pedrós and his colleagues has revealed that these tiny beings, lacking a brain or any other organ, possess something similar to neurons, the cells responsible for thought.
The biologist argues that the Cellular Atlas of Biodiversity would reveal a multitude of nature's secrets. “We have to be prepared to encounter unexpected findings. We did not study placozoans to understand the evolution of neurons and the nervous system. That naturalistic motivation is what I like the most. “We are explorers,” he maintains.
Each living being has exclusive DNA, present in each of its cells. In the case of humans, DNA is like a piano with 20,000 keys: genes. All cells have the same piano, but each one of them plays a different melody, which is why some are neurons in the brain and others are part of the muscle or fat in the love handle. Sebé Pedrós gives an example. His group created a couple of years ago the first atlas cell to cell cauliflower coral, an organism that forms reefs in the shallow waters of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The analysis revealed 40 different cell types. One of them, in charge of holding on to the rock, constantly touches a key that activates the production of an antimicrobial compound, as if he wanted to clean the surroundings. The coral cell atlas brought to light a new substance with antibiotic potential, in full global alert due to the threat of superbacteria resistant to all known drugs. “It was a surprise. The potential of finding new genes with new functions is very high,” celebrates Sebé Pedrós.
The meeting on May 15 in Barcelona was a success. The leaders of the main related international consortiums attended, such as the American biologist Harris Lewincoordinator of Earth BioGenome Project, which aims to read the DNA of all species of animals, plants, fungi and protists. The Belgian bioengineer also participated Stein Aertsdriver of Cell Atlas of the Flyand the British researcher Mark Blaxterwhich studies 70,000 UK species in the project Darwin's Tree of Life. Those responsible for the Atlas of Human Cells, the Israeli Aviv Regev and the German Sarah Teichmannthey intervened by videoconference.
The 3.6 million euros from the Moore Foundation will be used to launch “phase 0” of the project, explains Sebé Pedrós. The biologist and his colleagues will develop the methods to analyze each species and prepare the infrastructure of the monumental database, in collaboration with Irene Papatheodorou, from the European Bioinformatics Institute, in the English town of Hinxton. “We want to have the house set up for all the data that we will begin to produce on a large scale,” says Sebé Pedrós.
“There are many people working on this in the world, but we are very uncoordinated. When you want to access the results of a species, it is absolute chaos. There are no standards of any kind. There is also no coordinated effort to see who does what. “It's the Wild West,” says the biologist, who is finalizing an article to announce his initiative to the world in a leading scientific journal. “I know of many people who have done many experiments that have not worked and have wasted thousands and thousands of euros, but there is no culture of publishing your methods explaining everything that has not worked for you. The next person who tries it has to reinvent the wheel. We want to open the field and ensure that no one keeps their magic tricks to themselves,” says Sebé Pedrós. It is the first time that a scientific consortium of this magnitude is launched from Spain.
Phase 0 of the project will investigate eight species, already previously analyzed, cell by cell, to test the protocols. They will be the fruit fly, the worm Caenorhabditis elegansan annelid (the group of worms), a plant of the genus Marchantia, an anemonea fungus, a brown algae and possibly a sea urchin or starfish. “We want to study organisms that are difficult to handle, with hard walls, to test half a dozen cell-by-cell analysis methods,” says Sebé Pedrós. Common techniques consist of breaking up an individual and obtaining a suspension of single cells using force, sound waves or enzymes. Next, we examine which keys of the DNA piano each cell plays. “We want to obtain a universalizable method,” emphasizes the biologist.
The project will open a new world for science. “Cell atlases not only tell you about the biology of the organism you are analyzing. You can also study their interactions: who else is inside their cells and in which ones exactly,” details Sebé Pedrós. His team has investigated microalgal blooms in the ocean, linked to giant viruses that hijack cellular machinery. Scientists can analyze what type of cells the invaders are in and how they usurp the piano keys.
The biologist already imagines phase 1 of the project. “We could start with about 100 species that cover the entire tree of life. We will need another 10 or 15 million euros,” he calculates. “The ideal would be to sample organisms that are on both sides of the great transitions, such as the appearance of multicellular beings and the origin of the nervous system,” he adds.
Sebé Pedrós grew up among the typical steppe birds of the dry lands of Lleida. He has made expeditions in search of birds through North Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Chile and Israel, with more than 2,000 species observed. recently saw a Tengmalm owl, one of the few species left to see in Spain. In the eastern jungles of Australia, he encountered the mythical cassowarya bird up to two meters tall that can kill people. In his small office in Barcelona there is no decoration, just a drawing of a tapaculo —a brown bird from Chile— and a postcard with the face of Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution by natural selection. “What interests us is studying the evolution of cell types,” he says. “But first there are a lot of dense and boring technical questions that we have to solve.”
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