birding-aus

Portable DNA scanner aims to identify every bird species

To: "Birding Aus" <>
Subject: Portable DNA scanner aims to identify every bird species
From: "Kurtis Lindsay" <>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:08:04 +1100
Hi all,

I'm not sure if anyone else has posted about this on BA, but I recently read
an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a new form of technology being
developed by a conglomerate of scientists which will be able to identify
every bird and many more organisms in existence.

The system will apparently be in the form of a hand-held scanning device
which reads a mitochondrial DNA segment (quite like a barcode reader) from a
specimen, say a  bird feather or an insect leg. And it will then send the
code back to a database to be identified.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gotcha-8230-nature-unmasked/2008/11/1
9/1226770542509.html

The following website was set up by an associated team of scientists who are
aiming to obtain a 'genetic barcode' in the form of this standard segment of
mitochondrial DNA for every bird species in the world. By 2011 the team
declare they will have recorded every bird species in the world in their
database and in doing so will discover a further 1000 bird species
previously unrecognized to science as a result of splitting from known
species.

The link is attached below.

http://www.barcodingbirds.org/

 

Regards,

 

Kurtis Lindsay

===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, 
send the message:
unsubscribe 
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 
===============================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU