Near the entrance of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, a postdoctoral researcher named Witold Morek kneels beside a brick-and-flint wall, scraping lichen into an envelope. Inside that lichen, invisible to the naked eye, are tardigrades, microscopic animals sometimes called water bears, famous for their ability to survive the vacuum of space, boiling heat, extreme cold, and radiation that would shatter human DNA.
Morek is collecting specimens for the Tree of Life program, an ambitious project led by Professor Mark Blaxter that aims to sequence the genomes of 70,000 species. The program, part of the global Earth BioGenome Project, already sequences 48 genomes per week, a staggering acceleration from the 18 genomes Blaxter sequenced in his entire first 25-year career.
“The more we know, the more questions we are asking. It’s a never-ending story,” Morek told The Guardian.
Why the tardigrade
The tardigrade won the 2025 Invertebrate of the Year contest organized by The Guardian, and Blaxter’s team offered to sequence the winner’s genome as a public engagement project. But the tardigrade is more than a gimmick: its genome, roughly 30 times smaller than the human genome, contains the genetic instructions for its extraordinary survival abilities.
“There are biotechnology applications hidden inside all these little organisms’ genomes that we think are going to be really valuable as we move to a post-oil economy,” Blaxter said.
Understanding tardigrade genetics could lead to vaccines that do not need refrigeration, drought-resistant crops, or radiation shielding for astronauts. The tardigrade can enter a state called anhydrobiosis, drying out to a crisp tun and rehydrating back to life within 25 minutes. Some tardigrade species are separated by 550 million years of evolution, longer than the gap between humans and fish.
The sequencing challenge
A single tardigrade contains only 200 to 500 picograms of DNA. Older methods required pooling 1,000 individuals to get enough genetic material, impossible for rare species. The Tree of Life team developed a new protocol called Picogram Input Multimodal Sequencing, manually disrupting the 200-micrometer tardigrade and using PCR to amplify DNA fragments from a single specimen.
Four high-quality tardigrade genomes are already in public databases. Morek is working on 14 more, with approximately 50 tardigrade species awaiting sequencing in the freezer. He has so far collected about 20 of the 50 tardigrade species on the British list.
95 percent of animal life
Invertebrates make up roughly 95 percent of animal species on Earth, approximately 1.3 million described species. The Earth BioGenome Project, launched in 2018, aims to sequence all 1.8 million named eukaryotic species over approximately 10 years, at an estimated cost of $4.7 billion.
“Because most of life on this planet is small, like the tardigrades, this new approach to genome sequencing promises to open the gates to sequencing all of life,” Blaxter said.
The urgency is driven by the biodiversity crisis: up to 50 percent of species may go extinct by 2050. Sequencing creates a digital library of life, preserving the genetic information of species that may not survive the century.
The winner of the 2026 Invertebrate of the Year contest will be announced August 17. Whatever wins, Blaxter’s team will be ready to sequence it.