AEGIS - Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability

This partnership between Wellcome and NNF (Novo Nordisk Foundation) will support AEGIS - executive summary below:

Climate change poses a critical threat to human food security, and its impacts are forecast by the IPCC to affect agricultural production across much of the globe, putting a significant proportion of the world’s population at risk of food insecurity, if not starvation.

Although modern agricultural practices have built cropping systems that maximise yields in today’s climate, these typically lack genetic and organismal diversity, require intensive use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and heavy irrigation, and have limited resilience to rapid climatic and environmental change. Attempts to meet the coming challenges of food insecurity and ensuring agricultural sustainability are further constrained by the genetically depleted staple crops, the slow processes of conventional breeding and our poor understanding of organismal interactions and adaptations in both natural and agro-ecosystems. Yet each unique climate cycle, coupled with human

cultivation and plant domestication (starting ~12,000 years ago), produced novel genetic and organismal configurations, specific for all types of environments, but not seen since. This has resulted in an almostinfinite

number of past species adaptations and ecosystem responses to climate changes in a wide range of natural and human-modified settings.

The great majority of the genetic information underpinning these adaptive responses has been lost through evolutionary change. However, a rich record of those responses survives in the earth over many thousands and millions of years as ancient environmental DNA (eDNA). A single gram of sediment contains billions of DNA fragments and other ancient biomolecules, providing a comprehensive record of the organisms that inhabited the local environment, including fungi, bacteria, viruses, wild and domesticated plants and animals – even in the complete absence of living organisms or fossil remains.

Thanks to analytical developments in eDNA over the last two decades – and concurrent rapid advances in the ability to technically modify crops and their ecosystems – it is now possible to tap into this vast eDNA archive at scale to reliably retrieve genetic and organismal information from the past and use nature’s own solutions to climate change (across time and environments) as a means for improving future food sustainability. AEGIS seeks to do just that.