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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.
Wikipeople have free online directory of species WikiSpecies
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.
No, this is exactly NOT what we need. This is something a geek needs. You can't compare species with their DNAs. This is a great misbelief. An animal is more than just a little DNA (the same as a human). But this is one further example of throwing some technology and money at a subject, which it doesn't need this and destroying it therefore.
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.
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.