Scientists at the International Conference for the Barcoding of Life are planning to barcode every species on earth.
The International Conference for the Barcoding of Life is taking place in London this week. Anyone interested can view the conference live on the Web.
This webcast will take the form of live camera footage of the speakers from the Flett Theatre interlinked to the speakers’ on-screen presentations. Switching between the two modes will operated manually by a technician on-site so that it will be possible for web viewers to see the detail of the on-screen presentations as speakers refer to them.
The timetable of the presentations is given on this site to enable planning of live webcast viewing.
Live cast (will be live on Saturday)
From the Barcoding Conference site:
“The meeting will be focused on advancing the theoretical and practical issues in DNA barcoding. The conference will review and advance the state-of-the-art, expand the worldwide community interested in barcoding’, and harmonize research efforts.
Participants from diverse academic fields will be invited (including systematics, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, and genetics), as well as participants interested in taxonomy, biological databases and voucher collections (museums, herbaria, and tissue/culture collections), and applications of barcoding’ (including ecology, education, agriculture, conservation/ environmental management, environmental genomics, fisheries, forestry, law enforcement and medicine/public health).
The Conference will bring together experts in plant and animal taxonomy, forensic sequencing, environmental genomics, miniaturization of the sequencing process, collateral information management, uses of biodiversity information, and related fields.
This Conference will have a very high profile in promoting barcoding and displaying early results within the scientific community, while also focusing attention from many disciplines on advancing the technical foundation for accelerating progress and on exposing its potential to the society-wide user community.”
From BBC News:
“Researchers concede it will take many years to complete the task. “About 1.7 million species are known – we suspect there are anything from 10-30 million species on Earth,” explained Dr Richard Lane, director of science at London’s Natural History Museum. “We have discovered that it is quite possible to have a short DNA sequence that can characterise just about every form of life on the planet.”
This data will then be put into a giant database which the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) hopes can be used to link off to all the knowledge acquired by science on particular organisms.”
The BBC went on to say …
“And just as one might Google a species name today to find pictures or a description of an individual insect, the time may come when we have Star Trek-style mobile computers that can read off barcodes and access species information in the field.”
Another article by The Scotsman compares the project to creating a modern Noahs Ark:
“SCIENTISTS today embark on a momentous project to “barcode” every species of life on Earth and create what would be a modern-day Noah’s Ark.
The aim is to have a record of genetic sequences that identify every one of the estimated ten million species of plants and animals by 2010.
Many extinct species may also be barcoded using DNA from museum specimens.
Less than a fifth of the Earth’s flora and fauna have been named by scientists.”
“”Our mission is to develop DNA barcoding as a scientific tool for rapid identification of species and to put that tool to work for both science and society,” said Dr Scott Miller of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States and chair of the consortium.
It already has about 50 members in 25 countries on six continents and the numbers are growing, according to Miller.
The information it collects can be used to identify pathogens, carriers of disease, pests and to monitor endangered species.
The initiative will begin with three projects. One will provide barcodes for the 10,000 known species of birds by 2010, another will tackle the 23,000 types of marine and fresh water fish and a third will genetically label the 8,000 kinds of plants in Costa Rica, Central America.”
murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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