National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helps build DNA bar code library

Imagine scanning a DNA bar code on a piece of fish to instantly verify a species, where it came from, its nutritional value and other valuable information. ‘We need to accurately identify species for a number of reasons, from documenting the biodiversity of poorly sampled species and geographic areas to understanding populations and managing global fisheries in a sustainable way’ said Bruce Collette, a zoologist at NOAA’s National Systematics Laboratory. FISH-BOL is a part of the global Consortium for the Barcode of Life started in 2003 to bar code everything from fishes, mushrooms and flowers to microbes, insects and animals of every description.

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