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Identifying World's Species With Genetic Bar Codes
Fokker writes "Reuters reports that scientists from around the world launched a project on thursday to genetically identify species using bar codes. By taking a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information, the researchers plan to build the largest database of its kind."
that we will find more unique animals that we didn't know were unique. We are still identifying more unknown species every day, now with DNA species we thought are related will now be determined not to be.
..based on something from Star Trek. This is the very kind of thing I think of when they pull up their tricorder to some alien race, and poof, a strand of their DNA is up on one of those pretty LCD monitors behind them.
That being said, I think this is a brilliant use of computer technology. Catalogs and databases of this kind are what we need, especially while going through the jungles of various continents in search of miraculous wonder cures. Besides, if we had done this before with the Dodo and other animals that went extinct, we could rebuild the strands of DNA, and make the animal again for study. I tend to think more and more as we corrupt the planet with roads and sidewalks that research and food will be the only reason to have living stuff around, and knowing that we have a computer database of all that is alive and the ability through cloning to reproduce any of it is at least a comforting thought.
end rant.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The initiative will begin with three projects. One will provide barcodes for the 10,000 known species of birds by 2010, another will tackle the 23,000 types of marine and fresh water fish and a third will genetically label the 8,000 kinds of plants in Costa Rica, Central America.
When they will be able to classify the 2,000,000(estimate number of known species) species??And who will be the poor soul that have to carry the weight of the task(An intern maybe??)
Wikipeople have free online directory of species WikiSpecies
... the find ever species and make a bar code for it. Then what ? Call me dumb - but the point of a barcode is to easily scan it .. last time i checked, frogs dont have barcodes on them.
.. 'oh - i'll just check the barcode database! oh wait, it doesnt have one .. damn'
.. just build the database (perhaps spending more time (and cash) on it you could have the full DNA sequence .. not just a scrap)
;)
You find a weird insect
scrap the barcode thing
So next time we wipe out some endangered swamp monster we have a backup
Well, you may want to look up Admixture mapping to start. We don't really have species, but we have people from various backrounds with differing genetics that cluster by location due to population movements, bottlenecks, and migration.
Or: Yeah, you can tell the difference between say...chinese and japanese people by looking at the frequency of various single nucleotide polymorphisms.
There's actually a real lack of genetic data on marsupials and monotremes. Interesting for evolutionary reasons, but also because understanding how koalas break down toxins (such as various eucalyptus oils) gives general insights into drug metabolism (there are people studying this in my lab, in fact). If you'd like to donate funds for sequencing the kangaroo, go here.
Where I work, a group is using this technique to identify insect pest species.
If, for example, a group of insect eggs, or even just some parts of an insect like the legs, were found in a shipping container, then it can be extremely difficult to identify the insect species by morphology. By sampling and barcoding the DNA in the eggs or fragments then it can be determined which insect was present, and therefore whether a potential pest was present in the container.
For a country that depends on agriculture, like New Zealand does, this is a very important technology.
Maybe projects such as this one might solve some taxonomic debates such as the old chestnut about whether Megachiroptera (fruit bats) and Microchiroptera (insectivorous bats) are acutally closely related.
For those of you who don't know the debate is as to whether Megachiroptera are closer related to primates than they are to the Microchiroptera. I personally believe that fruit bats are flying monkeys. Therefore, fruitbats are the only primates native to Australia (besides Homo Sapiens obviously).
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
Maybe one like this
I could rant on but, I think this project is of some use only if combined with traditional taxonomy. The danger is that a large flashy project like this will steal research dollars away from traditional taxonomy.
It is not like the field of taxonomy is without flashy projects. Consider the Tree of life project for instance.
Given the information in the Wiki you referred to, wouldn't you say that the barcodes could provide a starting point for good taxonomy projects?
Reality or nothing.
barcoding.si.edu
From their DNA barcode page:
DNA barcode sequences are very short relative to the entire genome and they can be obtained reasonably quickly and cheaply. The cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 mitochondrial region (COI) is emerging as the standard barcode region for higher animals. It is 648 nucleotide base pairs long in most groups...
Let us note however that most of our planet's biodiversity is contained in the 60% of the biomass that people don't talk much about: Bacteria. Most of them live in the soil and are difficult to study and are simply unknown. It would seem that this barcoding project does not include Prokaryota ( = Bacteria,Archaea) unfortunately.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The barcode sequence will only be a means of identifying the species, not to find new ones or do taxonomy on them. The first connection between the sequence and the actual animal will be done by traditional taxonomy, because there is of course currently no other way do differenciate between many species than by the help of a specialist for the group.
But once this is done, if I find the beetle (or something) again, I can identify the species by myself with a PCR and sequencing, and don't have to mail it to a specialist who counts some bristles under the microscope for hours.
It's about exchanging the really hard do interpret morphology with sequence data as a means of identification.