DNA Barcode initiative

Barcoding is little more than half a century old, yet it has permeated every corner of civilisation. Barcodes enabled machines to recognise objects, and was the first viable technology for enabling computers to track vast systems. Barcodes saved money and time in every area of logistics, but more importantly brought order so that we could measure and analyse very large and complex systems. Now, in an ambitious initiative scientists want to apply this concept to life by using DNA - nature's unique barcode of every species of animal, plant and microbe - to create a vast library of every living organism on the planet. Such a global DNA barcode database would prove invaluable in numerous ways, from identifying new species of organism and monitoring biodiversity to detecting fraud.

The ECBoL initiative aims to establish a Network of European Leading Laboratories (NELL) among major biodiversity resource centres of Europe. This network will have the capacity to generate DNA barcodes of species at an industrial scale, for identifying life on earth. Once established, the consortium has a goal to initially barcode 1M specimens, representing 100K species within 5 years. Further initiatives will be launched to expand the barcode database in an attempt to represent all known and as yet unknown life on Earth.

The 'barcodes' in living organisms are short sequences of genetic material that are unique to that organism. In animals, for example, a particular gene sequence in a structure in the cell called the mitochondrion has been shown to be unique to any given species. Similar sequences have been found for plants, and scientists are actively searching for barcode genes in bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms.

It's essential that such an initiative is international in scope, and at this year's EuroBioForum meeting in Strasbourg in September, Professor Pedro Crous will be putting the case for Europe's involvement in the International Barcode of Life initiative.

"DNA barcoding will allow us to get a better understanding of life and a better appreciation of life," says Crous, who is director of the CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The key advantage of DNA barcoding over traditional taxonomy to identify organisms is the potential for its great speed and accuracy. "Conventionally organisms are identified largely based on aspects such as their size, colour and unique morphological features," says Crous. "This gives rise to a situation where many species can be identified only by taxonomic experts, who are few and far between. This can make it difficult to identify known species as well as new ones. DNA barcoding would solve all this."

The concept is simple. A sample of the specimen is processed to produce the barcode. This is then matched against a library of known barcodes and in this way the specimen is identified.

"So if a shipment of exotic animals arrives at the customs point, you can determine very quickly if it contains endangered species or not and apprehend the involved importers," Crous says. "You can also answer a whole range of complex ecological and biodiversity questions."

To do this, the barcode database must first be constructed. The International Barcode of Life initiative was proposed by Canadian scientists and is seeking to raise 150 million Canadian dollars (just under 100 million euros) to barcode 500,000 species over the next five years. The logistics will inevitably be complex, so the initiative is proposing a series of central and regional 'nodes' to fund and coordinate the activity across the world. Over the years it is hoped that every species - several million - will eventually be barcoded.

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