Paul Hebert - Global Excellence Initiative

Evolutionary biologist Paul Hebert and his team at the University of Guelph have a bold goal: to complete the inventory of life on our planet using an innovative approach— DNA barcoding.

“We use tiny slices of DNA — only about a millionth of the genome — to tell organisms apart,” he explains. It’s analogous to how retail barcodes discriminate products at a supermarket, making cataloguing life much more affordable and faster.

The pioneer of DNA barcoding and his team are working to register all species before mid-century and establish a global bio-monitoring system because life on our planet is imperiled. “Soon we’ll be tracking life in the oceans, in the rivers, and on land in near-real time”.

The work, for which Dr. Hebert won the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science, holds tremendous potential for the future of biodiversity. “People don’t want to live on a lonely planet,” he says. “I think they want to do right by the other organisms on it, but if you don’t know them and you can’t track them, it’s impossible to manage them.”

Dr. Hebert has built upon the work of Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis who invented PCR, a process for rapidly copying any segment of the genome. “What we brought new to the equation was standardization — that a tiny slice of DNA could discriminate all animal species on the planet,” Dr. Hebert explains. “And sequence analysis now costs less than a cent.”

Over the past 20 years, his research has attracted significant investment — including about $100 million from Canada and $60 million from other countries.

“We also established an organization called the International Barcode of Life which now leads the largest projects ever undertaken in biodiversity science. By 2030, we hope to convince the world to commit the billion-dollar funding needed to complete the inventory of life and activate a global bio-monitoring system.”

Dr. Hebert’s 150-person team works in two purpose-built buildings funded by research grants. “We lead the biggest sequencing operation for DNA barcoding, maintain the

largest archive of DNA extracts in the world, and will soon have the largest specimen collection in Canada. But most importantly, our informatics platforms protect and deliver all of this information to the world.”

“You can do a lot if you’re surrounded by a group of motivated people who know what they’re doing,” he says. “And have the funding to support them.