Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

The Barcode Blog

A mostly scientific blog about short DNA sequences for species identification and discovery. I encourage your commentary. -- Mark Stoeckle

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New scientific newsstand for marine barcoders

Identifying marine life is a major challenge. On land, nearly all animals visible without a microscope are in one of two phyla: Chordata or Arthropoda, the latter most often represented by insects.  In contrast, many ancient lineages are present in the oceans. Abundant marine phyla with well-known representatives include Mollusca (molluscs), Porifera (sponges), Cnidaria (corals, jellyfish), Ctenophora (comb jellies), Echinodermata (sea urchins, others), as well as Chordata (e.g. fish) and Arthropoda (e.g. crabs). Many marine species have strange immature forms (see sea urchin larva above), which may puzzle specialists and others. Even marine vertebrates can be challenging. Using mitochondrial DNA, researchers recently discovered that what were thought to be three families of deep-sea fishes were in fact larval, male, and female forms of a single family of fish (Johnson Biol Lett 2009). Observation of marine life is difficult except in a few near shore areas. It is easier for a school child with a pair of binoculars to survey the moon than for a team of oceanographers with expensive equipment to study the deep ocean.

As with the enigmatic fish species described above, routine application of DNA-based identification will advance oceanographic science, and I imagine will have an even more transformative impact than in terrestrial research. To help establish the DNA reference library, we have the Marine Barcode of Life Initiative (MarBOL), a joint effort of Census of Marine Life (CoML) and Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), which aims to “enhance our capacity to identify marine life” through DNA barcoding. I note that PLoS ONE recently set up “The MarBOL Collection” of papers devoted to marine barcoding and look forward to seeing how this scientific “newsstand” develops. In June, PLoS ONE received an impact rating of 4.351, placing it in the top 25% percentile of biology journals, making it a prominent place for highlighting and disseminating scientific developments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 2:36 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “New scientific newsstand for marine barcoders”

  1. Hugo Mejia-Madrid Says:
    July 29th, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    Parasites of marine organisms is a very challenging area, as well. I have been working with larval digeneans and nematodes of marine fishes, whose intermediate hosts are invertebrates (molluscs in the case of digeneans) and have found some affinities with GenBank sequences, but not that near as expected. That means there is probably an enormous wealth of species to be identified down there, and whose affinities are still not clear with other well-known parasites of marine life.

Contact: mark.stoeckle@rockefeller.edu

About this site

This web site is an outgrowth of the Taxonomy, DNA, and Barcode of Life meeting held at Banbury Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, September 9-12, 2003. It is designed and managed by Mark Stoeckle, Perrin Meyer, and Jason Yung at the Program for the Human Environment (PHE) at The Rockefeller University.

About the Program for the Human Environment

The involvement of the Program for the Human Environment in DNA barcoding dates to Jesse Ausubel's attendance in February 2002 at a conference in Nova Scotia organized by the Canadian Center for Marine Biodiversity. At the conference, Paul Hebert presented for the first time his concept of large-scale DNA barcoding for species identification. Impressed by the potential for this technology to address difficult challenges in the Census of Marine Life, Jesse agreed with Paul on encouraging a conference to explore the contribution taxonomy and DNA could make to the Census as well as other large-scale terrestrial efforts. In his capacity as a Program Director of the Sloan Foundation, Jesse turned to the Banbury Conference Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, whose leader Jan Witkowski prepared a strong proposal to explore both the scientific reliability of barcoding and the processes that might bring it to broad application. Concurrently, PHE researcher Mark Stoeckle began to work with the Hebert lab on analytic studies of barcoding in birds. Our involvement in barcoding now takes 3 forms: assisting the organizational development of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and the Barcode of Life Initiative; contributing to the scientific development of the field, especially by studies in birds, and contributing to public understanding of the science and technology of barcoding and its applications through improved visualization techniques and preparation of brochures and other broadly accessible means, including this website. While the Sloan Foundation continues to support CBOL through a grant to the Smithsonian Institution, it does not provide financial support for barcoding research itself or support to the PHE for its research in this field.