Virtual Centipede Brings Meaning to Sequencing 

In 1735, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus defined what would become part of biology’s foundation by defining taxonomic descriptions that would help scientists tell species apart. Now, a new study published in Biodiversity Data Journal is taking this method into the future by combining Linnaeus’ work with molecular tools, barcoding, and advanced computing and imaging technologies.

Last year taxonomists discovered 13,494 new animal species alone, but as animal diversity declines the pressure is on to accelerate these identifications in order to boost conservation efforts.

This is where the international team of scientists from Bulgaria, Croatia, China, UK, Denmark, France, Italy, Greece and Germany come in. Their study describes the need for faster description, and illustrates a new approach for taxonomic description with the newly discovered cave-dwelling Croatian centipede, Eupolybothrus caverniculos.

In addition to the traditional description of the creature’s appearance and internal structures, the team also created for E. cavernicolus a RNA profile, DNA barcoding data, a micro-CT, and a movie of a living specimen.

As the first animal species to undergo such extensive documentation, the centipede will be available to researchers around the world in a virtual format, thanks to the high-resolution anatomical data.

For Professor Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft Publishers, this effort is so significant as it takes big data and translates it into something that’s meaningful to the entire scientific community.

“Communicating the results of next generation sequencing effectively requires the next generation of data publishing,” Penev says. “It is not sufficient just to collect ‘big’ data. The real challenge comes at the point when data should be managed, stored, handled, peer-reviewed, published and distributed in a way that allows for re-use in the coming big data world.”

Doctor Scott Edmunds from BGI, and executive editor of GigaScience agreed.

“Next generation sequencing is moving beyond piecing together a species genetic blueprint to areas such as biodiversity research, with mass collections of species in “metabarcoding” surveys bringing genomics, monitoring of ecosystems and species-discovery closer together,” Edmunds says. “This example attempts to integrate data from these different sources, and through curation in BGI and GigaScience’s GigaDB database to make it interoperable and much more usable.”