Tarrc grew out of the fact that long ago the UK had rubber plantations in Malaysia, and set up research centres in the UK and Malaysia – TARRC is now the research centre in the UK for the Malaysian Rubber Board. Assembling and annotating the rubber genome is important, as Stuart Cook Tarrc’s Director of Research explains, ‘about 70 percent of natural rubber is used in tyres. Every time you fly anywhere, the aircraft tyre is predominantly made of natural rubber.’ The reason is that while synthetic polymers are useful, natural rubber is more resilient, durable and tough. ‘In a highly demanding product like a tyre, strength is important,’ explains Cook, ‘and larger tyres such as those for aircraft and trucks have an even larger proportion of rubber than car tyres.’ Tarrc’s Ewan Mollison, who worked on the sequencing, says that the size of the rubber genome (about two-thirds of the size of the human genome) made it a challenge. ‘And because the sequencing is so repetitive,’ says Mollison, it was like assembling a jigsaw where 50 percent is sea and sky and there’s no reference picture to work from.’
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