DNA Day: reading the secret book of Chilean biodiversity
In the Atacama Desert, where years can pass without rain, plants bloom. In the temperate forests of the south, alerce trees more than three thousand years old continue to grow. On Chile’s Pacific islands, entire species evolved without contact with the mainland. Each of those stories is written, letter by letter, in DNA. Learning to read them is one of contemporary biology’s central challenges.
DNA Day is celebrated every April 25, marking the 1953 publication of the double-helix model proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick using X-ray diffraction images obtained by Rosalind Franklin. Her data were used without her consent, and it took decades for history to recognize her contribution. That model opened the way to understanding, in chemical terms, how the information of all living things is stored and transmitted.
More than seven decades later, genomics has become a way of asking questions about life that could not previously be posed. In medicine, agriculture and conservation, reading a genome is like reading an evolutionary biography: what pressures shaped a species, which genes enabled its survival, and how much diversity remains to face what comes next.
In Chile, that question carries particular weight. The country brings together environments that elsewhere are separated by continents: the planet’s driest desert, temperate rainforests, glaciers, high-altitude salt flats and sub-Antarctic ecosystems. Organisms have evolved in geographic isolation in each of these environments, making them living archives of adaptation.
At the Millennium Institute Center for Genome Regulation (CRG), different teams study this biodiversity at several levels—plants, microorganisms and entire communities—to identify the genetic mechanisms explaining how species tolerate extreme drought, UV radiation, salinity or low temperatures. This information is not merely descriptive: it helps anticipate how populations will respond to a climate changing faster than many species can keep pace with.
Genomics also provides a practical conservation tool. Measuring genetic diversity within a population indicates how vulnerable it is, how much adaptive capacity it retains, and where protection efforts should be concentrated. For endemic species or those with restricted distributions, this knowledge can make the difference between persistence and disappearance.
CRG’s work extends beyond the laboratory. In recent years, the institute has developed outreach initiatives that bring genomics to schools, science fairs and places that science rarely reaches, including island communities and rural areas. The idea is simple: DNA is not a textbook abstraction; it connects an altiplano llareta plant with a sub-Antarctic alga and with the person reading this article.
Celebrating DNA Day in a country like Chile means recognizing that every organism carries an ancient text. The forest, the desert and the sea are libraries. We are only beginning to learn how to read them.