Like any adolescent, the cotton bollworm has a tendency to wreak the maximum amount of havoc possible. Everything on a crop that is important to humans, it likes to eat: the boll of cotton plants, where the cotton fibre is produced; the head of corn, where it finds the juicy kernels; the fruit of the tomato plant, which needs no explanation.

Catholic in its tastes, it will go after “anything that’s green and vertical”, as Professor Phil Batterham puts it, in the process causing an estimated $5 billion in damage worldwide, every year.

After many years of trying, however, the genome of the cotton bollworm is about to be sequenced. In a multidisciplinary initiative, the CSIRO and the University of Melbourne are leading a global project to sequence the genome of Helicoverpa armigera, and to do a light coverage of some of its relatives, including Helicoverpa zea, its American cousin.

H. armigera is found in Australia, Asia, southern Europe and Africa; H. zea is found in North and South America. Together, the moth inhabits any part of the globe that is vaguely warm and therefore agriculturally significant, Batterham says.

Indeed, the two species are so closely related that many argue they are one – if they are crossed, their progeny is fertile, fulfilling the biological species concept.

Genetic analysis, however, is showing a few differences, and while they might not yet be different species, they are probably well on their way to being so, Batterham says.

“They are very closely related so anything you learn about the genome of one of the species is immediately applicable to the other. Furthermore, there are a number of other Helicoverpa species that are also pests, so what you really have is a cluster of pest species.”

Batterham, a geneticist from the University of Melbourne, is a well-known figure on the Australian genomics scene, both as the head of the Centre for Environmental Stress and Adaptation Research (CESAR) and as convenor of the Australian Genome Alliance.

He was one of the primary forces behind pushing for a genome sequencing project – any genome sequencing project, to be fair – which eventually resulted in the Tammar wallaby consortium.

Although he rejects any credit for any role in that project getting up, anyone who has met him will know just how dear to his heart the Helicoverpa project is, promising as it does incredible insight into one of the world’s most destructive agricultural pests but also many downstream benefits that few in government, the public or perhaps even the wider scientific community understand.

“I had previously put to the Federal Government, as convener of the Australian Genome Alliance, a proposition that Australia invest in genomics as a starting point for research pipelines that could deal with significant issues for Australia,” he says.

“The previous government bypassed all opportunities to take that up and I hope that with the drop in sequencing costs we could really do something significant now as a country, to take control of our biodiversity and to use it. I’m hoping that this project will actually be the first of many.”