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Identifying World's Species With Genetic Bar Codes

Posted by samzenpus on from the scan-the-fish-first dept.

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."

4 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. The result will be by hashish · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Open Directory by wces423 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wikipeople have free online directory of species WikiSpecies

  3. one use for this technology by hengist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Barcoding web site by lovebyte · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.