Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Barcoding Life
From: David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 13:09:19 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: David Magda <dmagda () ee ryerson ca> Date: January 2, 2008 8:58:14 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Barcoding Life Reply-To: David Magda <dmagda () ee ryerson ca> For IP if you wish,Daniel Janzen gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation a few years back. Search for his name (April 9th 02004 entry) for his talk:
http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/The first part of the talk is about bio-diversity, and then he goes into the "barcorder".
They use the COI mitochondrial gene for identifying things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding On Jan 1, 2008, at 18:17, David Farber wrote:
________________________________________ From: Jim Fruchterman [Jim.F () Benetech org] Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 3:15 PM To: Allen Smith; tt () postbiota org Cc: Jim () Benetech org; David Farber Subject: RE: [tt] [IP] Barcoding Life You'll need to find multiple regions to distinguish all life, because what works on vertebrates may not work with invertebrates or plants or bacteria, as you point out. The "barcoding" concept is slightly misleading: you aren't expecting identical sequences for all members of a species like you would if it were a 12 oz. bottle of Classic Coke. The real issue is whether intra-species variation is significantly smaller than inter-species variation: I believe they are aiming for a 10X difference in variation for barcoding techniques to be workable (I think it's called the barcoding gap, say .5% variation intra-species and 5% variation inter-species).But, the great thing is that it's testable, and that's the phase they'rein: collecting a bunch of data and evaluating different loci. Oneregion did perfectly for birds in an article I saw cited. If one regionisn't enough, it's not hard to imagine a second one. And, if you have two regions that are both 95+% discriminating and relatively independent, you can build a pretty cheap gizmo that would be pretty darn accurate. But, I'm not a biochemist...
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