Key scientific partners and funders from around the globe gathered in London today to officially launch the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a global effort to sequence the genetic code of all the planet’s eukaryotes — some 1.5 million known species, including all plants, animals, protozoa and fungi.

Today also marks the announcement by the Wellcome Sanger Institute that it will lead the UK contribution to the EBP by sequencing all 66,000 eukaryotic species across the British Isles, a new project known as the Darwin Tree of Life Project. The Wellcome Sanger Institute, a nonprofit based in the UK, is one of the world’s leading genome centers.