The Hindu : Front Page : New leap in amphibian research

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 03, 2007
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New leap in amphibian research

P. Venugopal

The Western Ghats frog.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Centre for Environmental Management of Degraded Ecosystems (CEMDE) at the University of Delhi is taking up an ambitious project that can pitchfork research into the amphibian diversity of the Western Ghats onto a higher plane. The region is considered one of the hottest biodiversity hotspots in the world.

The project, supported by the Department of Biotechnology, Union Ministry of Science and Technology, envisages developing DNA barcodes for the amphibian fauna of the Western Ghats, according to eminent frog scientist S.D. Biju, a reader at the CEMDE. With the development of the DNA barcode system, identification of new species of amphibians from this region will become easier, thereby opening doors to unknown information about the amphibian diversity of this region.

Dr. Biju, who is the chief investigator for the project, had shot into international fame in 2003 with the discovery of Nasikabatrachus sahydrensis, a new species of frog belonging to a new family, which he and a Brussels-based evolutionary geneticist Franky Bossuyt had reported in the science journal Nature. Biologists worldwide had described that event as a “special, one-in-a-century find” because the previous discovery of a new family of frogs was way back in 1926.

India harbours 230 known species of amphibians, which include frogs and caecilians. The Western Ghats region is unique in amphibian diversity due to extraordinary endemism and special evolutionary relationships the amphibians of the area have with other bio-geographical settings. According to Dr. Biju, who has already put in 15 years of field research in the region, the knowledge of biological diversity of the Western Ghats is far from complete even at the higher taxonomic levels.

One reason for the tardy progress of research in the subject in India has been the lack of initiative to develop quick and testable hypothesis-driven methods to screen species diversity and identify putative new species requiring description.

The existence of species with intermediate characters makes identification very tricky and time consuming under the traditional scientific methods. Identification systems based on DNA have the potential to facilitate both the classification of known species and discovery of new ones.

The project for developing DNA barcodes for the Western Ghats amphibians, to be completed in three years with the involvement of more researchers and institutions working in the field, will help identify centres of endemism and establish the conservation status of amphibian species in the Western Ghats, Dr. Biju told The Hindu.

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