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Barcodes of life

Biologists everywhere are racing to classify all plants and animals on earth before key habitats are degraded or destroyed. With such comprehensive information, they hope to see an encyclopaedia of life hosted on the Internet, explaining and depicting the appearance, features, and functional role of millions of species in nature. It is heartening that this mission to classify all species, including the smallest micro-organisms, has achieved new progress through ‘DNA barcoding.’ In this method proposed four years ago by the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and adopted by many others, a short genetic sequence from a standard part of the genome is used to identify a species. This is similar to a barcode applied in a supermarket for products. More than 200,000 DNA barcode records of 25,000 species have now been created and the pace of documentation of specimens available in zoos, museums, herbaria, aquaria, seed banks, and tissue collections is accelerating. The technique, which currently serves comparative biologists as a quick reference guide, complements conventional taxonomy; it is being refined in the case of plants for greater accuracy.

The progress in species identification techniques is of great interest to India, which has remarkable megadiversity. Its forests in the Western Ghats, the Eastern Himalayas, and parts of the Northeast are species-rich. These vast natural laboratories, access to which is possible only with official permission, hold the promise of yielding many new species. But scientists generally find it difficult to get permits to access these protected areas and handle specimens for bona fide research. The forbidding nature of the rules issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and a general aversion to deep scientific enquiry embedded in state forest departments act as hurdles. Luckily, this uninspiring climate is not deterring researchers from pursuing conservation biology. Their hope lies in the many young foresters who are keen to facilitate scientific enquiry. An enabling, rather than a forbiddingly bureaucratic, approach is vital to the global ‘Barcode of Life’ initiative which involves eight national institutions, some of them universities. The Centre for Environmental Management of Degraded Ecosystems at the University of Delhi is also documenting amphibian diversity in the Western Ghats through DNA barcoding. With the biodiversity that still survives in the 21st century, India can make a significant contribution to the global knowledge base on the web of life. But it needs a stronger commitment to conservation research and an independent wildlife service in the MoEF.

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