DNA Barcoding Technology is Advancing
This week, more than 450 researchers and industry experts are set to meet at Australia’s University of Adelaide, for the fourth International Barcode of Life Conference. They will celebrate the innovations in DNA barcoding, and discuss some of the applications for the new technology.
DNA barcoding basically means identifying a species of animal, based on a sample of their DNA. A short genetic marker can be compared to the ever-growing Barcode of Life Database – a guide to more than 16,700 species – to identify a species within a few hours.
Just eight years later, the project is a major success. It’s headed up by the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) at the Smithsonian Institution, and has been utilized in many projects around the world. In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved its use in the industry in October of this year.
Applications
This could enable barcoding technology to be utilized in restaurants to bury the concerns of suspicious customers as to the true origins of their food.David Schindel, executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, told the Associated Press that leaders in the restaurant and seafood supplier industries have begun discussing ways to use the technology to show that their food is legitimate. “We’re going to start seeing a self-regulating movement by the high-end trade, embracing barcoding as a mark of quality,” he said.
Another potential application to be talked about at the meeting is the use of the technology to determine the ingredients in herbal medicines, to unveil the frauds that replace actual chemicals with useless substitutes. Currently, a library of DNA barcodes for the 1,200 species of plants in Malaysia is being developed, to help curve fraud in that country.
Scientific Value
The value of this technology in scientific research can’t be exaggerated. Eva Bellemain, from the University of Oslo, will exhibit project BarFrost at the conference, which hopes to scan arctic permafrost to search for molecules of DNA to determine which animals lived there and in what time period.
“In the Arctic, fossils are scarce and time-consuming to find and analyze,” Bellemain commented in a press release. “However, DNA is one tough molecule. It had to be in order to serve its purpose the last billion years and more. Incredibly, it can linger in soil for tens of thousands of years and stay relatively intact.”
It can also be used to determine which animals prey on other animals in only a few hours by DNA barcoding a predator’s excrement, analyze water quality by examining the number of microbes, and examine long-term population trends in any animal.
The technology’s uses will only increase as the database continues to grow. At the conference, the group will be announcing how they plan to have a library of 5 million DNA sequences by the end of 2015.
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