museums are really the archives of
scientific knowledge we think that the
future of meeting the needs to 21st
century biology will be about frozen
tissues life on ice the Smithsonian has
just built the largest Natural History
buy repository in the world biologists
are going to be spending a lot of the
next few decades sequencing the genomes
of many kinds of life on Earth we’re in
the field out at Edgewater Maryland
which is the Smithsonian Environmental
Research Center and we are here to start
working out the methods for how you put
life on ice you might ask so why do we
do this well as a scientist the main
reason is that I want to understand the
history and the diversity of life on
Earth for 300 years we’ve been studying
the morphology of animals the behavior
of animals the ecology of animals what
we’ve discovered in the last 20 is that
all of those things leave signals in
their genomes so there are a couple of
really hard problems if you haven’t be
able to solve with classical data and we
think that genomic data is is the way to
solve all those problems
see and he’s in there ash looks like a
Luka gay yeah that’s one will be
catching spiders live and then plunging
them directly into liquid nitrogen which
by the way is a very fast and painless
way to go it’s instant toes ready so
this is sacrificing the spiders
you hear that why care about spider
genomes it’s too obvious reasons our
silk and poison they have some of the
most elaborate and precise poisons of
any organism on earth they’re widely
used in neurobiology research so that
you can see the mechanism of how the
poison affects cells in say in a human
body so we think nature is a library of
solutions that are waiting to be
discovered
museums are repositories of all sorts of
information that people have used in the
past and haven’t used yet so we’re
adding to it to a museum collection in a
different way and has been traditional
and basically you know it museums will
have investments in ethanol
they’ll have specimens that are dried
and pin they’ll have specimens that are
in drawers and they’ll have specimens
that are in the bio repository and
liquid nitrogen so it to me it seems a
normal thing for a museum to be doing
which is to be adding to its collection
the liquid nitrogen tanks hold tens of
thousands of samples at minus 190 at the
moment liquid nitrogen is the gold
standard for long term and by long-term
the Smithsonian’s in the forever
business now we’re starting to
centralize our frozen tissue collections
so we’re somewhere between 200,000 and a
half a million samples the reason we do
this is people like to do genomic work
they do file genetics they do toxicology
work with our samples so researchers
request samples and we actually go in
and we pull samples out we cut a small
piece of it and send them out to the
researchers every time science jumps to
a new phase the museums will follow up
this technology of doing genome
sequencing is advancing rapidly by
building a library of frozen tissues
where you can do genomics of life on
Earth we’ll be doing what museums is all
we have always done which is to
concentrate life into a collection that
will support research
you
scientific knowledge we think that the
future of meeting the needs to 21st
century biology will be about frozen
tissues life on ice the Smithsonian has
just built the largest Natural History
buy repository in the world biologists
are going to be spending a lot of the
next few decades sequencing the genomes
of many kinds of life on Earth we’re in
the field out at Edgewater Maryland
which is the Smithsonian Environmental
Research Center and we are here to start
working out the methods for how you put
life on ice you might ask so why do we
do this well as a scientist the main
reason is that I want to understand the
history and the diversity of life on
Earth for 300 years we’ve been studying
the morphology of animals the behavior
of animals the ecology of animals what
we’ve discovered in the last 20 is that
all of those things leave signals in
their genomes so there are a couple of
really hard problems if you haven’t be
able to solve with classical data and we
think that genomic data is is the way to
solve all those problems
see and he’s in there ash looks like a
Luka gay yeah that’s one will be
catching spiders live and then plunging
them directly into liquid nitrogen which
by the way is a very fast and painless
way to go it’s instant toes ready so
this is sacrificing the spiders
you hear that why care about spider
genomes it’s too obvious reasons our
silk and poison they have some of the
most elaborate and precise poisons of
any organism on earth they’re widely
used in neurobiology research so that
you can see the mechanism of how the
poison affects cells in say in a human
body so we think nature is a library of
solutions that are waiting to be
discovered
museums are repositories of all sorts of
information that people have used in the
past and haven’t used yet so we’re
adding to it to a museum collection in a
different way and has been traditional
and basically you know it museums will
have investments in ethanol
they’ll have specimens that are dried
and pin they’ll have specimens that are
in drawers and they’ll have specimens
that are in the bio repository and
liquid nitrogen so it to me it seems a
normal thing for a museum to be doing
which is to be adding to its collection
the liquid nitrogen tanks hold tens of
thousands of samples at minus 190 at the
moment liquid nitrogen is the gold
standard for long term and by long-term
the Smithsonian’s in the forever
business now we’re starting to
centralize our frozen tissue collections
so we’re somewhere between 200,000 and a
half a million samples the reason we do
this is people like to do genomic work
they do file genetics they do toxicology
work with our samples so researchers
request samples and we actually go in
and we pull samples out we cut a small
piece of it and send them out to the
researchers every time science jumps to
a new phase the museums will follow up
this technology of doing genome
sequencing is advancing rapidly by
building a library of frozen tissues
where you can do genomics of life on
Earth we’ll be doing what museums is all
we have always done which is to
concentrate life into a collection that
will support research
you
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