Agencies work on DNA 'barcodes' for Earth's 1.8M known species
Pastor Dale Morgan
Agencies work on DNA 'barcodes' for Earth's 1.8M known species*
By John Heilprin, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — To help shoppers avoid mislabeled toxic pufferfish and
pilots steer clear of birds, federal agencies are starting to tap into
an ambitious project that is gathering DNA "barcodes" for the Earth's
1.8 million known species.
A consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations is overseeing the
building of a global database made from tiny pieces of genetic material.
Called DNA barcoding, the process takes a scientist only a few hours in
a lab and about $2 to identify a species from a tissue sample or other
piece of genetic material.
David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive
secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said the purpose is
to create a global reference library — "a kind of telephone directory
for all species."
"If I know that gene sequence, I can submit it as a query to a database
and get back the telephone number," he said. "I can get back the species
name."
The government's interest in the project stems from a variety of
possible uses.
The Food and Drug Administration has begun eyeing it as a tool to ferret
out hazardous fish species and to confirm a type of leech used in some
surgery. In May, the FDA used it to warn that a shipment labeled
monkfish from China might actually be a type of pufferfish that could
contain a deadly toxin if not prepared properly.
The Federal Aviation Administration and Air Force hope it will help them
identify birds prone to collide with aircraft. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration sees it as a means to track commercial fish
and reduce killing of unwanted species also caught by nets.
A growing collection of feathers and other remains of birds that
collided with planes has provided "operational" information for the FAA,
said Scott Miller, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution who chairs
the consortium's executive committee.
"They have an almost complete reference database for the North American
bird species," Miller said. "It is a routine tool that they use."
Elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency is testing species
barcoding to identify insects and other invertebrates that indicate how
healthy rivers and streams are. The Agriculture Department is
contributing genetic data it has compiled on fruit flies in an effort
help farmers control pests.
Among the agencies experimenting with the database, EPA has found that
as it grows in size it is becoming "more and more useful as a practical
tool for identifying species," EPA spokeswoman Jessica Emond said.
Scientists call it barcodes to compare it to the supermarket scanner
codes that are indecipherable except to machines. But with plants and
animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic
building blocks of DNA to identify the species.
Users gain free access to a repository of archival genetic material run
jointly by U.S., European and Japanese facilities.
About 30,000 species have been logged in the database so far, but
scientists hope to reach 500,000 within five years. A two-year goal is
to have sequenced 2,800 — or about 80% — of the 3,500 different species
of mosquitoes.
Yvonne-Marie Linton of the Natural History Museum in London, said
efforts to reduce mosquito populations blamed for up to 500 million
human malaria cases and 1 million annual deaths each year are
consistently hindered by misidentifying the species responsible.
Linton, who heads a project to barcode the mosquito species, said
correctly identifying and controlling those carriers of malaria and
other mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever and the West Nile virus
are the "key to disease management."
Miller said barcoding is "basically going to revolutionize the way that
mosquito survey and monitoring is done."
The consortium is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of
Natural History. It grew out of 2003 research paper in which geneticist
Paul Hebert at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, proposed a
database of DNA barcodes for identifying all species. Now, the
Smithsonian and university share in the barcoding work.