The problem with plants

The problem with plants By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life The Barcoding Factory Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world Back pocket barcoder? Animal barcoders are on a tear. Every day they inch closer to completing a library of CO1 sequences from the planet's birds, fishes, mammals, and invertebrates. But researchers hoping to barcode Earth's plants are in a different boat. "Animal people are well on their way," sa

Written byBob Grant

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By Bob Grant

Cataloging Life

The Barcoding Factory

Hiding in plain sight

Slideshow: Barcoding the world

Back pocket barcoder?

Animal barcoders are on a tear. Every day they inch closer to completing a library of CO1 sequences from the planet's birds, fishes, mammals, and invertebrates. But researchers hoping to barcode Earth's plants are in a different boat.

"Animal people are well on their way," says Santiago Madriñán, a botanist at the University of the Andes in Columbia. "We are stuck."

Barcoding Earth's plants could help curb the trade in illegal plant products, verify botanical ingredients of herbal medicines, and could help botanists better understand and catalogue the planet's floral biodiversity.

Barcoding plants is difficult because they hybridize readily, muddling species boundaries and making barcoding with one snippet of DNA nearly impossible. Also, the mitochondrial gene CO1 works well as an animal barcode, but is highly conserved across plant groups. So ...

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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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