Genomics in the jungle: a field laboratory success story

Abstract

Conservation genomics has long been bottlenecked by a lack of access to biosamples from rare species within remote ecosystems; but this is changing, and fast. We tackled this bottleneck by flipping the paradigm on its head — why take samples to a lab when you can take labs to the samples? The miniaturisation and portability of sequencing devices is enabling conservation genomics to scale, in situ. Supported by the In Situ Lab Initiative, regional scientists are driving all aspects of the analysis pipeline, from sample to sequence.