Singapore scientists will join an international team to help collect tissue and DNA samples from 10, 000 species of animals in a large scale study that has never been done before, Singapore's leading research agency said on Thursday.

Scientists from the Agency for Science, Technology & Research ( A*STAR)'s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) will join hands with 70 leading scientists from major zoos, museums, research centers and universities in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia in a project known as the "Genome 10K project."

The team will create a collection of tissue and DNA samples for 10,000 species of animals and sequence their genomes and analyze them to reveal their complete genetic heritage, A*STAR said in a news release.

The Genome 10K Project will build up an invaluable repository of DNA sequences for conducting comparative studies, which may enable scientists to even reconstruct the evolutionary history of the human and other vertebrate genomes.

Sydney Brenner, a scientific advisor to A*STAR, said, "The most challenging intellectual problem in biology for this century will be the reconstruction of our biological past so we can understand how complex organisms such as ourselves evolved. Genomes contain information from the past, they are molecular fossils, and having sequences from vertebrates will be an essential source of rich information."