A species in a second: The promise of DNA ‘bar codes’

When an astronaut sets foot on an alien planet and sees moving shadows in a nearby wood, he whips out a scanning device that immediately identifies the menacing life-form. If such devices are standard equipment for visiting distant planets, why can’t we have them here at home, where less than a fifth of the Earth’s 10 million species of plants and animals have been catalogued.

A simple way of identifying species may not be too much longer, if an idea known as DNA bar coding should prove as good as its advocates say. DNA bar coding is the idea of Paul D.N. Hebert, a population geneticist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. It has attracted support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York, where it has been championed by a programme officer, Jesse H. Ausubel of Rockefeller University.

This April, a consortium of major natural history museums and herbariums launched the Barcode of Life Initiative, a plan to create a DNA bar coding database that would be linked to identified specimens in their collections.

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DNA bar coding depends on analysing part of just one gene, the same gene in all cases, for every species. If a bar code database of all species is established, a biologist could take a piece of tissue and feed it into a hand-held device.

With a cellphone call to the database, the device would identify the species and present its description. —NYT