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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High school students to explore wilds of New York City with DNA, win prizes

On March 8, 2011, scientists and science educators at Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, announced the “Urban Barcode Project.” From the website www.urbanbarcodeproject.org :

The Urban Barcode Project (UBP) is a science competition spanning the five boroughs of New York City made possible by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Just as a unique pattern of bars in a universal product code identifies each item for sale in a store, a DNA barcode is a DNA sequence that uniquely identifies each species of living thing. In the project, student research teams use DNA barcoding to explore biodiversity in NYC.

Projects can use DNA barcodes to examine any aspect of the NYC environment, such as:

  • Sampling biodiversity in a park, garden, office, or school.
  • Checking for invasive plant or animal species.
  • Monitoring animal movements or migrations.
  • Identitying exotic or endangered food products in markets.
  • Detecting food or product fraud.

On the website there is a neat 1 min video, a helpful informational brochure, FAQs, and details on $20,000 in prize money!

I am the Scientific Advisor on this project and I think this is a wonderful way for high school students to do science.  And one that is likely to inspire efforts elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 11:15 am 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 “High school students to explore wilds of New York City with DNA, win prizes”

  1. Bentley Midkiff Says:
    March 24th, 2011 at 11:54 am

    Hi, Mark…

    I have been following your blog for a while and always enjoy your articles. I would like to get my own kids involved in a project like this, but we live in NC.

    I was wondering if there are any private labs that will perform DNA barcoding for individuals not associated with any particular institution. A brief Google search does not reveal any obvious companies providing such services.

    Also, I am curious about the average cost of barcoding a specimen.

    — BRM

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.