Program Areas

Through its Peer and Rolling awards programs, GGI has funded nearly 100 Smithsonian projects to collect and preserve Earth’s biodiversity in the Smithsonian’s biorepository. The Smithsonian’s biorepository is perhaps the flagship facility for biodiversity genomics and seeks to maintain that position through the continued growth and investment in genetic collections for research both at the Smithsonian and globally. Through GGI’s support, the NMNH has made nearly 240,000 standardized plant and animal genetic samples discoverable for research.

The Global Genome Biodiversity Network - Early on, GGI working within the unique framework of the Smithsonian, focused on eliminating the biggest obstacle obstructing universal genomic research: the preservation of, and access to, genomic samples. Realizing that global progress towards this goal required international partnership and collaboration, GGI founded and leads GGBN, the pre-eminent worldwide guide to accessible biodiversity genomic samples.

GGBN is an international network of biorepositories because multilateral collaboration is essential in the 21st century. As of March 2021, this eight year old, rapidly expanding network has nearly 100 members in 37 countries, with over 3 million samples, and already contains half of all biological families on Earth. GGBN is a “big data” one-stop index to all scientific genomic samples on Earth, serving as the infrastructure for GGI collections.

GGI Gardens - With the collections infrastructure well in place through GGBN, the Global Genome Initiative is now focusing its efforts in strategically filling those collections starting with gaps in plant biodiversity. The Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (GGI-Gardens) is an international partnership dedicated to preserving and understanding plant diversity on Earth by sampling tissues from gardens, greenhouses, and arboreta and making the records of these tissues discoverable for research in order to better understand their relevance to humanity. As of May 2020, the GGI-Gardens partnership consists of 25 partners from four continents working towards the preservation and discoverability of their living collections.

There are an estimated 350,000 species of plants on Earth and a large number of them have not yet been discovered or described. Collecting, much less preserving genome-quality tissue samples, for so many organisms is a monumental task, but one that GGI-Gardens is prepared to tackle. Unlike animals, extraordinary proportions of all plant diversity have been in cultivation by gardeners literally for millennia. One third of the botanic gardens around the world contain more than 30% of land plant species, 59% of land plant genera, and 75% of land plant families, globally. From this strategic perspective, botanic gardens are uniquely positioned to answer to the GGI mission—to preserve and understand Earth’s genomic biodiversity.

GGI aims to increase the understanding of biodiversity genomics through the goal of advance third generation sequencing with technology partners. By December 2018, GGI directed a total of $350,000 to support 19 projects as part of GGI’s exploratory science program. These projects support work with technology partners to advance third generation sequencing and use this technology to answer important questions about biodiversity, such as how specific species groups fall in relation to other species groups at the molecular level, or how biogeographic and diversification patterns compare among ancient lineages of organisms.

The 19 exploratory science program projects are providing novel genomic resources for a breadth of the diversity of life in order to aid in the understanding of evolutionary relationships. These projects have generated targeted genomic resources (genomic markers) for 151 families, representing 569 species. Publication of these results began in 2018 and will continue through 2022.

GGI supports computational resources and infrastructure by participating in system administration and management of Smithsonian centralized computing for genomics research. Computational resources at SI include centralized computing (Hydra-5; OCIO) encompasses 80+ nodes (5,088 CPUs); 39 TB total RAM, including 1 node with 2TB of RAM, 2 nodes with 1TB RAM, 15 nodes with 512GB of RAM, and 45 nodes with 256 GB of RAM; 3 PM of disk storage, as well as two new Intel nodes specific for genome assembly (1 TB of RAM; 72 CPUs, 2-4TB of solid-state disk). GGI computational research support has resulted in more than 31 publications since January 2015. Computational hours devoted to genomics on Smithsonian shared resources were over 1.8 million hours in 2018 alone.

As a member of the Smithsonian Bioinformatics Working Group, GGI employees participate and lead genomic, data analysis, and Carpentries workshops for Smithsonian affiliates throughout the year. To see a list and materials used for past workshops click here. 

GGI-supported genome sequencing, analysis and publication are maximized through partnerships. As of March 2021, a total of 2,159 eukaryotic families and 7,362 eukaryotic genera have been published to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Assembly database by principle investigators, globally.

GGI engages the next generation of biodiversity genomic scientists by providing training through STEM programs, advanced fellowships, and visiting scientist opportunities. Our staff regularly participate in museum-wide outreach programs and mentor scientists at a variety of levels, including high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and senior-level faculty members.

GGI has supported a number of outreach programs for students at the National Museum of Natural History, including a molecular laboratory boot camp for high school students from under-represented communities in the DC area, the Yes! Global Genome Initiative: The Next Generation of Genomic Researchers program ; an undergraduate crash-course in modern field biology in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Society and local universities; undergraduate and high school internship opportunities in genomic sample preservation techniques and research bioinformatics.

GGI’s fellowship program provides opportunities for postdoctoral scientists to conduct new and innovative research in biodiversity genomics in order to better understand Earth’s genomic biodiversity.

GGI supports museum outreach events in biodiversity genomics such as weekly biodiversity informatics assistance brown-bag lunches, local workshops and citizen science programs. Events range from the DC Girls Who Code  immersion program workshop on data analysis techniques in science to the DC City Nature Challenge.

In order for GGI to reach its preservation and understanding goals, standards and best practices for collecting, managing and studying Earth’s biodiversity must be communicated to the global research and collections community. This is achieved by working with collections and technology partners to disseminate knowledge through GGI supported workshops and publications.