Botanical barcoding will allow scanner to identify plants

Scientists will be able to identify plants with a supermarket-style scanner after developing the first DNA "barcode" for plants.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 28 Jul 09;

A DNA library of 60,000 animal species has already been amassed to help scientists identify animals from small samples.

However "botanical barcoding" has been more challenging because of the hundreds of thousands of plant species.

Now for the first time botanists from all over the world have agreed a standard DNA barcode for plants that will make it possible to develop a library of different codes for thousands of plant species.

This means that in the future scientists will be able to take a supermarket-style hand-held scanner into the field which will identify different plants by their barcodes.

The technique will work on minute amounts of tissue and can be used on fragments of plant material. It could be used to identify illegal trade in endangered species like rare timber, invasive plants, poisonous species and fragmentary material in forensic investigations.

However the main application will be assessment of the diversity of species in the world's biodiversity hot spots where a shortage of specialist skills hampers conservation efforts.

Dr Peter Hollingsworth, Head of Genetics and Conservation at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, who has chaired the group of more than 50 scientists from all around the world said eventually some kind of scanner could be developed.

"Identification is important – it is the link between a given plant and the accumulated information available for that species. It is not possible to know if a plant is common or rare, poisonous or edible, being traded legally or illegally etc, unless it can be identified.

"Conservation prioritisation, in particular, can be impeded by a lack of knowledge of what species grow where. But identifications can be difficult: there are a large number of plant species and some look very similar. Juvenile, non-flowering or fragmentary materials are notoriously difficult to identify," he said.

"DNA barcoding is one way round the problem – the principle of the approach is to identify a stretch of DNA which is suitable for telling most species apart and to use this to build a massive and easily accessible database to provide a universal system for identifying the world's biodiversity."