Project Psyche

Mark Blaxter leads the Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme, generating and analysing reference genome sequences from thousands of species across the tree of life, including the biota of Britain and Ireland (Darwin Tree of Life), symbiotic organisms (Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics) and international initiatives (Earth BioGenome Project). His research focuses on the genomics of neglected, non-model organisms and the interpretation of those genomes in ecological and evolutionary contexts. Before joining Sanger, he was Professor of Evolutionary Genomics in the University of Edinburgh. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2014.

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Claudia Bruschini, a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, specializes in chemical communication in social insects and venom analysis in social Hymenoptera using GC-MS. Her research interests include insect biogeography, systematics, and conservation. She investigates historical and present factors influencing species distributions using mt-DNA analysis. She actively contributes to the development of DNA barcoding libraries, collecting samples from diverse insect species. Additionally, she conducts Lepidoptera surveys through transects, focusing on conservation and assessing species vulnerable to climate change, especially in Mediterranean regions.

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Leonardo Dapporto leads the Numerical and Experimental Zoology Lab, based in the Biology Department of the University of Florence. Leonardo’s interests lie in integrating different approaches to understanding insect diversity. Leonardo applies eclectic taxonomy to identify diversity elements and comparative analyses to describe the distribution patterns of species and their genetic lineages. They are also strongly involved in conservation actions devoted to safeguarding insects populations through monitoring activity and habitat amelioration. To achieve their research and conservation goals, they make large use of citizen science data also promoting its use in dedicated events.

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Vlad Dinca is based at the Grigore Antipa at the National Museum of Natural History in Romania. He has always been passionate about Lepidoptera and his research uses these insects, in particular Western Palearctic butterflies, as models to learn more about speciation, cryptic species, phylogeography, and the impacts of environmental change, but also to inform conservation programmes.

He is extremely excited to be part of Project Psyche – this is both due to its challenges and to its great potential to open new horizons using genomics, with countless possibilities to understand more about Lepidoptera and life in general.

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Irena Klečková is a researcher at the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Molecular Ecology and Phylogenetics Lab. Her research focuses on the role of ecological drivers in speciation processes. With an ecological background and a particular interest in butterfly ecophysiology and thermoregulation—she is motivated to study the evolution of local adaptations to novel environmental conditions linked to climate change. The Psyche project aims to provide reference genomes that will be crucial for population genomics studies of European butterflies. Understanding butterfly population genomics, identifying genetically unique populations, and detecting possible signs of selection are essential for effective planning of translocation to novel suitable habitats and overall landscape management, such as designing dispersal corridors.

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Kay Lucek currently leads the Biodiversity Genomics Lab at the University of Neuchâtel funded through the SNSF Eccellenza program. Being fascinated about the evolutionary mechanisms that underlie the outstanding diversity of Lepidoptera, the group studies the role of chromosomal rearrangements during speciation, the various outcomes of secondary contact as well as cryptic species for conservation.

The Biodiversity Genomics Lab is proud to be part of the Psyche project as it provides the unique opportunity to bring together people with various backgrounds at a pan-European level, advancing the field of evolutionary biology even beyond Lepidoptera.

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Pável Matos-Maraví is a group leader at the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is interested in butterfly macroevolution and biogeography, and he and the group at the (Molecular Ecology and Phylogenetics Lab) strive to understand the mechanisms generating extant patterns of butterfly diversity and distribution. For that, the group studies phenotypic and trait data evolution along phylogenomic trees at the macroevolutionary scale, as well as population genomics at the microevolutionary scale. He is very excited about the project Psyche because it will not only leverage a huge amount of high-quality genomic resources for the community but it also offers a platform for collaboration and networking among researchers with different expertise working with Lepidoptera

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Joana Meier is a Royal Society URF and a group leader at the Tree of Life Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a Branco Weiss Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her group works on factors contributing to rapid speciation, with a focus on hybridisation and chromosomal rearrangements. She is very excited about the possibility that project Psyche brings for comparative analyses across Lepidoptera in Europe.

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Marko Mutanen is a professor in Molecular Systematic and Bioliteracy at the University of Oulu, Finland. He is currently leading the Finnish Barcode of Life project, the Insect Bioliteracy research group, the Biodiverse Anthropocenes university research profiling programme and several other research projects broadly focussing on biodiversity genomics. His present research also focusses on developing efficient genomic approaches to speed-up taxonomic workflows of the ‘dark taxa’. The project Psyche will make the European Lepidoptera a unique model to address a variety of important questions on all levels of biodiversity.  As a keen collector, Mutanen will contribute to specimens sampling particularly regarding the North European fauna.”

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Roger Vila is CSIC Researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, where he leads the Butterfly Diversity and Evolution Lab. He studies insect diversity patterns in time and space, and their evolutionary causes. Usually butterflies, but also other insects like ants, are used as model systems to answer general questions regarding the limits between species, how species are created, and the link between phylogeography and ecology. He has extensive experience in field work, having made multiple expeditions worldwide.

The project Psyche is like a dream come true for him: it will provide an invaluable tool to explore biodiversity and will boost our knowledge on butterflies and moths.

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Niklas Wahlberg is a professor in biological systematics at Lund University, Sweden. He has worked on the phylogenetics of Lepidoptera for over 20 years, pioneering the use of Sanger sequenced markers in the molecular systematics of Lepidoptera. With the advent of genomic technology, he and his group have focussed on developing protocols to sequence whole genomes from museum specimens, i.e. museomics. Assembling the often highly fragmented genomes of museum specimens benefit greatly from reference quality genomes of related species. The project Psyche promises to generate such high quality reference genomes, which will be highly interesting for systematics of Lepidoptera in themselves, as well as highly beneficial for museomics projects.

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Charlotte Wright is a PhD student in the Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme. Charlotte’s PhD has focused on studying chromosome evolution across Lepidoptera using the hundreds of chromosomal genomes generated by the Darwin Tree of Life project. Charlotte is keen to build upon the success of these initiatives, expanding the sequencing of Lepidoptera to across Europe and enabling a deeper understanding of the process that drive chromosome evolution in this megadiverse order of insects.

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