The Barcoding Factory

The Barcoding Factory How one facility sequences 125,000 barcodes per year By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world Back pocket barcoder? The problem with plants On an October afternoon, I watch as Kate Crosby uses a DNA extraction robot to purify genetic material from frog tissues that a researcher had sent to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) to be barcoded. She loads the

Written byBob Grant

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By Bob Grant

Cataloging Life

Hiding in plain sight

Slideshow: Barcoding the world

Back pocket barcoder?

The problem with plants

On an October afternoon, I watch as Kate Crosby uses a DNA extraction robot to purify genetic material from frog tissues that a researcher had sent to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) to be barcoded. She loads the appropriate reagents into the robot's intestines and then adjusts the suction pressure on the gasket manifold. As Crosby steps back and lets the machine do its work, the robot shuttles a plastic plate containing 94 wells filled with frog muscle tissue back and forth. A similarly arranged array of pipette tips squirts and slurps solutions into and out of the wells. Over the hum of the robot, Crosby tells me where the samples were collected: "Some from Vietnam, some from Cambodia, I believe, and most of them are from China."

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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