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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Norway Convenes Barcoding Collections Symposium

Representatives from 15 natural history museums and research institutions in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark gathered at Oslo Natural History Museum on 20-21 March 2006 to discuss the role genetic resource collections in the Barcoding of Life Initiative. Lutz Bachmann, Arild Johnsen, Jan T. Lifjeld, and Jon Lonnve organized an enjoyable and productive meeting, including many well-timed coffee breaks! There was general enthusiasm about museums joining in a collective effort, the public and scientific importance of genetic collections and natural history museums in understanding and preserving biodiversity, and the Barcoding of Life Initiative. As an initial step, the Natural History Museum in Oslo plans to barcode Norwegian birds, drawing on its 10,000+ samples of avian tissues. For more information contact Jan T. Lifjeld (j.t.lifjeld@nhm.uio.no).

Locations of natural history museums represented at Oslo meeting

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 11:25 pm and is filed under AllBirds, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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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.