Yggdrasil (ig-druh-seal) is a pilot initiative geared towards leveraging Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands potential in becoming a significant contributor to the goals of the Earth Biogenome Project (EBP) - a public release of high quality reference genomes from as many of our planet’s eukaryotic species as possible.
Yggdrasil principally exists to generate reference genomes for species of interest to Danish, Faroese and Greenlandic researchers, despite the species' geographic origin – on the condition that samples provided are of sufficient quality, and the provider has a legal basis for providing it. We aim to scale up the project to tackle any challenge. However, given our relatively small size there are constraints to what we can tackle, in terms of size and complexity of any target species’ genome, the amount of biological material available for processing, and chemical complexity of the tissue.
The initiative is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and situated at the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute leverages on a previous infrastructure grant awarded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation supporting a PacBio facility at the university's Department of Biology.
Our current funding enables us to cover labor and computational costs involved in genome sequencing. With users covering reagent costs, we can then provide genomes at an economical price. In return, we mandate that all genomes are immediately released to the public upon completion of assembly and annotation to be consistent with aims of the Earth Biogenome Project.
To learn more or discuss possible projects, please contact us by directly emailing the Project Coordinator, Prof Tom Gilbert (tgilbert@sund.ku.dk)
