DNA "barcodes" target biological discoveries

In Borneo, Marta Paterno, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Verona in Italy, is preparing samples for portable DNA sequencers.centuries, biologists have struggled to identify new species at a slow pace, describing the physiological characteristics of samples, and often trying to incorporate them into the tree of life before naming and publishing them. Now they are already trying to determine whether a specimen can be identified as a new species in a matter of hours, and will soon be able to do so at a very low cost. It's a revolution driven by short-chain DNA, a DNA known as a "barcode" designed to pay icing on the familiar product identifier. Combined with fast, inexpensive DNA sequencers, these "barcode" differences are sufficient to provide a marker for identifying species.
" biodiversity science is entering a golden age. Paul Hebert of the University of Guelve in Canada said. On June 16th a team he leads will launch a $180m global campaign to identify more than 2m new multicellular organisms. Other research groups have followed this approach, combing samples of new species in the lab and even directly in the wild. Biologists have welcomed the technology as species around the world are disappearing faster than they are being discovered.
years, I've dreamed of changing these rules and bringing a portable genome lab to where the samples are," he said. Massimo Delledonne, a geneticist at the University of Verona in Italy, said. He recently used bar code technology to quickly discover a new species of snail in the forests of Borneo. "Wild barcode technology is now ready for prime time."
experts estimate that there are between 8.7 million and 20 million plants, animals and fungi on The Planet, but so far only 1.8 million have been officially described. Insects are an undiscovered area of species. "Overall, they may have more biomass in their land habitat than all wild vertebrates combined," said Rudolf Meier, a biologist at the National University of Singapore who has been developing bar code technology with small DNA sequencers. In
2003, Hebert came up with the concept of DNA barcodes , which distinguish biological species by sequencing less than 1,000 mitochondrial DNA bases from a sample. After a while, the idea became popular, but by this time Hebert and other enthusiasts had begun compiling barcodes from known species. In 2010, for example, he led a team called International Life Barcode (iBOL). The $80 million project, centred on Guelve, aims to establish a reference library for known species and their identification sequences. It now has more than 7.3 million barcodes (more than one per species) and has proven to be a resource that can be used not only to identify known organisms, but also to record their interactions with other species, including judging who ate and who ate them based on different barcodes in a particular sample.
iBOL is now about to begin a seven-year follow-up, supported by funding and in-kind services from 30 international partners. The project, called BIOSCAN, will collect samples from 2,500 locations around the world and study intersex interactions, with the aim of expanding its reference library to 15 million barcode records, 90 percent of which come from unsealed species.
hebert says the data will lay the groundwork for monitoring pollution, land-use change and the impact of global warming on biodiversity. Eventually, "we will be able to track life on Earth like we track the weather."
, Hebert said, unlike iBOL's previous focus on extracting barcodes for known species, "one of the main goals this time will be to discover new species." If the software is unable to match a sample's barcode sequence to an existing species, it immediately marks the sample for closer genetic and visual examination and may identify it as a new species.
past, it could take years or even decades for scientists to identify certain organisms as new species. For example, some fly species differ significantly only in the shape of male genitalia.
Hebert predicts that custom bioinformation and sequencer can read enough bases at a time to obtain a complete barcode, which will keep costs low -- about $1 per sample, including collection, preservation, DNA extraction, sequencing and subsequent analysis. He expects the total cost of the sequencing portion to eventually fall to about $0.02 per sample