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."

Comments

what about the zebras?

[Suburbanpride]

Wont this hurt the self esteem of the animals that already have barcodes?

Why? For Check out lines?

[DanThe1Man]

"Could I get a price check on a large brown marsupial?"

The result will be

[hashish]

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.

Re:The result will be

[extensis]

I have to admit i ahve yet to read the article, but did write a lengthy report on the subject last semester...
The region of DNA they are using as a barcode is a 561 bp stretch of the cox1 gene, which encodes Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit 1.
The gene is found in the mitochondrial DNA in all animals and plants, and many homologues are in bacteria and other forms of life.
There are some great resources out there

http://barcodinglife.com/, The official site.
Or for the geeky, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, GenBank, search for cox1, it's the second most sequenced gene on the planet,
you'll find it's sequence and other info you can play with 'bioinformatically'.

If anyone is interested Cytochrome C Oxidase is the final protein in your electron transport chain.
It is the enzyme that reduces oxygen in your body (try breathing in!), and is found in 'nearly' all life that lives in oxygen.

Um... GenBank?

[davidstrauss]

That project, minus the insignificant addition of photos, is already widely underway at GenBank, a part of NCBI, which is in turn part of NIH. Most major biological journals require submissions of sequences to GenBank prior to consideration for publication. Combined with NCBI's taxonomic system, I don't see the value of this new project.

I work in this lab. Specifically, I'm working on objective analysis of RNA sequence alignment heuristics.

Pet store efficiency

[Orgadam]

Does this mean the pet stores of the future will allow a cashier to swipe an animal across an electric eye, greatly increasing the efficiency and speed with which people can buy large quantities of animals? Such a system could greatly help out my habit of buying as many mice as I can! Although, it becomes a problem when geneticists demand that barcodes be placed on individual fruit flies so that they, too, can be bought quickly and efficiently.

Yeah, I know the barcodes won't be put on the animals... but maybe after a trial run, customers will demand it!

Open Directory

[wces423]

Wikipeople have free online directory of species WikiSpecies

Partially useful

[onco_p53]

The fragment of DNA that they are sequencing is located on the mitochondria and is part of the cytochrome c oxidase gene (COI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcode

I am a taxonomist and can tell you this is of limited usefulness, sure we will be able to see some differences between organisms, but this is already done is many studies with the control region of the mitochondria.

The problem could be if people just rely on these sequences alone to delineate species, we learnt this years ago in bacterial taxonomy that you simply cannot rely on any one particular gene (There is evidence of horizontal gene transfer in 16S genes if someone was going to counter with that).

A speciation event is driven by some environmental pressure (change in temperature say). The genes that are under selection of this pressure will change at different rates to one under no direct pressure (COI).

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.

one use for this technology

[hengist]

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.