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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News Flashes

You have 1 more day! Abstract deadline is 12 midnight tomorrow, June 15,  for the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference, Adelaide, Australia, 28 November-3 December 2011. Online submission form here.

Young scientists to help document what lives on Earth! Coastal Marine BioLabs (CMB), a private, research-based scientific educational organization in Ventura, California was awarded a 3-year NSF grant to train high school teachers and students in DNA barcoding, with the goal of contributing reference sequences to Barcode of Life Database. CMB students and their teachers will be part of the International Barcode of Life project, which aims to expand BOLD (currently about 1.2M barcodes from 130K species) to 5M records from 500K species, the largest biodiversity intiative ever. For more on how students are helping build the genetic database of global species diversity, see Sacramento Bee news story and CMB web page.

 

 

Barcode of Life Connect tops 1000 members! If you haven’t already, I encourage you to visit and join the Barcode of Life Connect site, a “network to allow DNA barcoding professionals to discuss issues, share profiles, form special interest groups, and more.”The more includes webinars and links to upcoming relevant conferences. The core of the site is the chance to connect with like-minded barcoding professionals, either directly through their profiles or through discussion groups–so far there are 40 groups ranging from “Medicinal Plants” to “Madagascar” and “Portugese-Speaking Barcoders.”

 

To get an idea of how barcoding has taken hold around the world, particularly with young scientists, try perusing recent pictures posted by Connect members–I take the liberty of re-posting some images of the investigators and their specimens-enjoy!

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 at 10:05 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.