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| 1KITE project | |
|---|---|
| Name | 1KITE project |
| Abbreviation | 1KITE |
| Type | Research consortium |
| Start | 2012 |
| Field | Entomology |
1KITE project
The 1KITE project was a large-scale international consortium focused on comprehensive phylogenomic sampling of insect diversity, integrating broad taxon sampling across Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera and other orders to resolve deep evolutionary relationships among hexapods and related arthropods. The initiative brought together researchers from institutions such as the Max Planck Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the Natural History Museum, London, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Oxford to produce transcriptomic and genomic datasets that interfaced with public resources like GenBank, Dryad (repository), and the European Nucleotide Archive. Its outputs informed debates involving classical authorities such as Charles Darwin, contemporary frameworks like the Tree of Life, and international collaborations modeled on projects such as the Human Genome Project and the 1000 Genomes Project.
The consortium assembled sequencing efforts across global museums and universities including the Museum für Naturkunde, the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Academy of Sciences, the Finnish Museum of Natural History, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, the Korean National Arboretum, and the Australian National Insect Collection to sample representatives from orders widely represented in collections such as Odonata, Orthoptera, Blattodea, Mantodea, Phasmatodea, Neuroptera, Siphonaptera, and Trichoptera. The project emphasized open data policies aligned with standards from organizations like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life while engaging large-scale comparative frameworks such as PhyloBayes, RAxML, and approaches championed by groups like the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Primary goals included resolving basal divergences among Insecta and evaluating hypotheses regarding relationships between lineages like Hexapoda and Myriapoda, testing classic classifications influenced by figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and generating reference transcriptomes to support studies in comparative genomics and applied fields tied to institutions like Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Scope covered sampling across geographic centers including the Amazon Rainforest, the Congo Basin, the Himalayas, the Sundaland, the Madagascar biodiversity hotspot, and island fauna cataloged by the Galápagos Islands programs to reflect biogeographic patterns discussed in works by Alfred Russel Wallace and modeled using methods from the International Barcode of Life initiatives.
Specimen acquisition leveraged networks involving the Royal Society, the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council, and regional natural history collections such as the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Sampling prioritized fresh-preserved specimens for RNA extraction from tissues used in protocols standardized by labs at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Broad Institute, and the Beijing Genomics Institute. Library preparation and sequencing workflows employed platforms from companies like Illumina, analytic pipelines adopted conventions from the Sequence Read Archive, and quality control adhered to best practices promoted by the World Health Organization in analogous large-scale sequencing consortia.
Analyses combined transcriptome assembly tools (used by groups at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences) with orthology inference pipelines comparable to those from the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee collaborations, and phylogenetic inference using software such as IQ-TREE, MrBayes, and ExaML. Data integration drew on ontologies and metadata standards from the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), and comparative workflows included gene tree–species tree reconciliation approaches seen in studies from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
Key outcomes supported revised higher-level relationships among major insect clades, provided evidence affecting interpretations of Paleozoic and Mesozoic divergence timings used in paleobiological syntheses by the Paleobiology Database, and reshaped views on the evolution of flight and metamorphosis discussed in classic literature by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and modern syntheses published through the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The project generated hundreds of transcriptomes serving as reference datasets for subsequent studies at institutions like the National Institutes of Health, informed conservation priorities highlighted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and produced datasets incorporated into educational resources developed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and university curricula.
The consortium was funded by a mixture of grants and institutional support from agencies including the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council, the China Scholarship Council, the German Research Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, private foundations similar to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and contributions from museum endowments like those at the Smithsonian Institution. Collaborating laboratories spanned the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, the Imperial College London, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Melbourne, and the Peking University.
The consortium catalyzed follow-on initiatives integrating genomics with trait databases maintained by projects such as PanTHERIA and geographic repositories like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, enabling downstream research at centers like the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. Future directions include expanding whole-genome sequencing comparable to efforts by the Vertebrate Genomes Project and integrating fossil calibrations from collections at the Natural History Museum, London and the Smithsonian Institution to refine divergence estimates, while continued partnerships with international agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and funders like the Wellcome Trust will shape translational and conservation outcomes.