DNA barcoding: from fish to furniture

Updated November 30, 2011 12:29:57

Over 450 experts in DNA have converged on Adelaide for a conference that has major significance for fishmongers, furniture dealers and life on Earth generally.

Andrew Lowe, Professor of Plant Conservation Biology at the University of Adelaide, is co-host of the Barcode of Life Conference which begins today.

He says just as barcoding identifies products in a supermarket, so too DNA barcodes differentiate between species.

"In all living things there's DNA, and DNA is the basic building blocks that describes how those species, all those individuals, will turn out," he said.

"We've been able to DNA sequence for quite a long time, for a number of decades, but what DNA barcoding is doing is it's agreed particular genes to sequence that then can provide a genetic identification for all species on Earth," he said.

DNA also varies within species by geography, allowing scientists to pinpoint the region that a tissue sample originally came from.

The technology could help quarantine officials identify whether timber comes from a protected forest or a catch of fish comes from no-fishing zones.

Quarantine officials around Australia are already starting to use the technology to prevent invasive plants, weeds, and pests from entering the country; only tiny samples are needed for testing, enough to distinguish its DNA.

In the seafood industry, DNA barcodes are used to make sure dolphin isn't being sold as tuna.

In timber, Adelaide University is developing DNA "fingerprinting" technology that would assure renovators that their new hardwood flooring does not come from an endangered tropical forest.

Professor Lowe says the university has already discovered instances where Indonesian merbau timber being sold in Australia as being from Papua - where it is sustainably harvested - actually comes from Java or Sumatra, where it is not.

He says genomic technologies – pioneered by the Human Genome Project – are also speeding up the process of species identification.

"We don't even know how many species on Earth there are; estimates are around 10 million but some other estimates are around 100 million," Professor Lowe said.

"Using traditional methods for describing species we've only described about 1.4 million... so that's been a relatively slow process."

Analysing only a short genetic sequence, enough to distinguish between any species, makes DNA barcoding a quick and comparatively simple process compared to the Human Genome Project, which analyses the whole DNA sequence of a specific species.

Scientists are creating a database of these barcodes so that tissue samples can be matched to a species; 167,000 species are already represented, up from 12,700 in 2005.

The technology was first proposed by Canadian researchers in 2003.

According to the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, a partner of the conference in Adelaide, the best biology laboratories can now produce DNA barcode sequences in a few hours as cheaply as $5 per specimen.

Professor Lowe says the technology is becoming more widely available; this would allow, for instance, restaurants or furniture dealers to do tests on their own products.

"We hope that the technology behind barcoding will be miniaturised, and it is being miniaturised, and we can get it down to a desktop machine," he said, adding that this is probably five to 10 years away.

Scientists are also using the technology to decipher what lived in the Arctic in ages past; analyse the contents of animals' stomachs to see what they're eating; and assess water quality.

Topics: dna, cloning-and-dna, research, science-and-technology, adelaide-5000

First posted November 30, 2011 11:46:49