INNOVATION May-June 2017

animals. As such, they serve as good indicators of ecosystem health. The bug soup collected in the traps was sent to the Hebert at the University of Guelph for high-throughput next-generation sequencing to identify the species present at each site. More than 50,000 specimens were collected, and more than 4,000 species were identified—mostly flies, bees, ants, and wasps. These numbers are normal for a healthy grassland environment. The project also identified several new species of spider previously unrecorded in BC. “For us, there’s no regulatory driver to do the genomics,” Davidson says. “We just see it as a tool by which we can get the right information to guide our management practices.” Scaling Up Pioneering projects like those at Mount Polley, New Afton, and a handful of others around the province are outliers. Researchers and organizations like Genome BC are hoping other companies embrace genomics as a diagnostic tool and help build the datasets required to make the results applicable to a range of issues in and around mines. “One of the challenges the mining sector faces is scaling these genomics solutions up to the industrial scale,” Lopez-Correa says. Genomics, she explains, is often perceived as expensive due to the upfront investment required for small pilot projects. Cancer researchers faced similar challenges years ago and were unable to develop new drugs with only a handful of human genomes. However, once their databases were populated with thousands of genomes, patterns emerged and solutions could be tailored to a range of problems. Mining will likely take the same path, as more companies see the benefits and participate.

know what they’re doing. It’s early days—advances are happening at an astronomic pace.” v

“Genomics is an evolving field,” says Baldwin. “There are so many microorganisms in the environment that we know nothing about, we don’t know how to culture, we don’t

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