Project Psyche Is Elevating Lepidoptera Genome Sequencing

It’s a little after 6:30 on a brisk July morning in a stone hut high in the Italian Alps. A gently hissing wood fire is leaking some warmth out of a brick oven. Gathered near it, around a big wooden table, some of Europe’s brightest young lepidopterists are doing what they do best: arguing in Spanish, Italian, and English about moths.

The Alte Pforzheimer Hütte, a stone house originally built in 1901, served as a base camp for the lepidopterists hunting rare moths in the Italian Alps.Luigi…