Key Concepts

• Traditional methods for classifying plants and animals demand great skill and time. Examining a small portion of the DNA is faster and easier.
• This new method is called barcoding, because it was inspired by the barcode on products.
• The authors propose that a segment of mitochondrial DNA can distinguish animal species. They imagine a day when a hand­­­­­held scanner (similar to a GPS device) will link to a database of the barcodes of all species. Then, by in­serting a snippet of tissue into the scanner, anyone can get an instant identification of a creature or plant.

Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth?

Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features—color, shape, even behavior—to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA—something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products—would require far less time and skill.

   
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