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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Barcode libraries grow on the web

The All Birds Barcoding Initiative (ABBI) website barcodingbirds.org provides a continuously updated progress report on barcoding world birds. A live feed matches barcodes deposited in the

Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) to a checklist of world birds.  barcodingbirds.org visitors can view world and regional progress reports, progress by orders and families, and detailed results for individual species including zoomable Google world maps showing where barcodes were collected.  A link out to species pages in Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is provided.

A sibling website fishbol.org provides live updates for the Fish Barcode of Life initiative (FishBOL) which aims to collect barcodes from all fishes, approximately 30,000 species.

In addition to assisting researchers scattered across the globe track progress and coordinate efforts, these sites will interest many other persons. They link an enormous amount of taxonomic information with growing genetic databases derived from museum collections. The instant Google maps provide a early glimpse of what these sites can do.  Future tools will overlay genetic differences in mitochondrial DNA barcodes on top of the geographic map. These “mashups” of traditional taxonomy, widely-accessible species identification through genetic barcode analysis, and user-friendly visualization will have many viewers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 5:43 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.

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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.