Slideshow: Barcoding the world
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 ...
