Mid-scale RI-1 (M1: DA): Designing Scalable Community-driven Infrastructure to Support Biodiversity Genomics (SCIBG).

The full inventory of living beings on Earth, underpins human health, economic prosperity, environmental resilience, and national security. The genetic differences found across plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms drives discoveries that advance biotechnology, agriculture, food security, biosecurity, and the development of future medicines and therapeutics, while supporting the rapidly growing U.S. bioeconomy. While other nations and international initiatives have invested in coordinated biodiversity genomics efforts, the United States currently lacks a coordinated, national infrastructure for producing high-quality reference genomes at the scale needed to meet growing scientific demand and remain globally competitive in genomics. This project will design the Scalable Community Infrastructure for Biodiversity Genomics (SCIBG), establishing the foundation for a shared national resource that expands access to advanced genomics capabilities, strengthens the Nation's research infrastructure, supports workforce development, and accelerates discoveries that advance science while enhancing economic competitiveness, public health, biosecurity, and ecosystem resilience. This award addresses NSF priorities in Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology. SCIBG will design an integrated, end-to-end infrastructure for generating high-quality, reference genome resources representing U.S. biodiversity. The project will develop scalable laboratory protocols, interoperable computational workflows, automated data management systems, community governance models, and mechanisms for broad researcher access through a Community Access Sequencing Program. It will also develop advanced computational methods, including Artificial Intelligence tools, to automate genome assembly and curation, overcoming major bottlenecks that currently limit the speed, scalability, and accuracy of biodiversity genomics. The resulting design and prototype will pave the way for future implementation of a sustainable, community-driven national platform that supports the Earth BioGenome Project, enables the future production of thousands of high-quality reference genomes annually, and provides openly available software, standards, training resources, and genomic data for the broader scientific community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.