Scientists to capture DNA of trees worldwide for database

[Dover]

Scientists to capture DNA of trees worldwide for database



A team of researchers at the New York Botanical Garden's Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory at the Bronx, New York is leading a global effort to barcode the DNA of every tree species on Earth, all 100,000 of them. The laboratory, with sweeping views of trees and a pond, reflects the work going in indoors.



The Bronx garden is hosting a meeting this week where participants from various countries will lay the groundwork for how the two-year undertaking to catalog some of the Earth's vast biodiversity will proceed.

The project is known as TreeBOL, or tree barcode of life. As in a similar project under way focusing on the world's fish species, participants would gather genetic material from trees around the world.

A section of the DNA would be used as a barcode, similar to way a product at the grocery store is scanned to bring up its price. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.

The resulting database will help identify many of the world's existing plant species, where they are located and whether they are endangered. The results are crucial for conservation and protecting the environment as population and development increases, said Damon Little, assistant curator of bioinformatics at the Botanical Garden and coordinator of the project.

"If you don't know what you're potentially destroying, how can you know if it's important or not?" he said. "We know so little about the natural world, when it comes down to it, even though we've been working on it for hundreds of years."...>

http://www.physorg.com/news128926280.html

[dweller]

1. excellent news

dp