• By JORDAN BLUM
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Nov 5, 2009 - Page: 1B

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

LSU is expected to provide much of the DNA and tissue specimens for a new international project to assemble a “genome zoo” of 10,000 vertebrate species.

The nearly 70-scientist team published its “Genome 10K Project” proposal today in the Journal of Heredity, an academic periodical published by Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

Genome 10K is planned as an ambitious follow-up to the highly publicized Human Genome Project completed in 2003 that identified and sequenced the more than 20,000 genes in human DNA.

“If you know the DNA sequences for all these animals, you can know a huge amount about their genome pathways … and evolutionary history,” said Fred Sheldon, director of the LSU Museum of Natural Science and curator of genetic resources.

Practical ramifications could range from wildlife and ecological preservation improvements to the better understanding of human diseases through animal evolution, Sheldon said.

The project began in April out of the University of California at Santa Cruz and quickly involved a number of biological scientists and computer scientists worldwide.

“The only other thing they were missing was the animals,” Sheldon said.

And that is where LSU came in.

“LSU has the world’s largest collection of wild vertebrate tissues,” Sheldon said.

The LSU Museum of Natural Science in Foster Hall houses about 200,000 tissue samples from 100,000 animals and nearly 6,000 species, Sheldon said. The collection began more than 30 years ago.

So, hypothetically, LSU could provide the tissues for about half of the Genome 10K animals, he said.

LSU’s collection specifically offers huge amounts of bird, reptile and amphibian tissue samples, he said.

“This is a pretty big, high-profile project for us,” Sheldon said. “It’ll be the biggest, one-time project we’ve done.”