The New York Botanical Garden has launched a two-year project called Tree-BOL to DNA barcode all 100,000 species of the trees of the world. The garden received a grant of more than half a million dollars from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to undertake the program.
A number of researchers and other institutions from around the world will participate in Tree-BOL, and the garden will sponsor an international symposium in 2010 on Plant DNA barcoding at the end of the project.
James Miller, the garden's VP for Science, said the garden will "bring together scientists from around the world in a concerted effort to advance the field of plant DNA barcoding." Miller added that the goal of the international scientific community is to barcode 500,000 species in the next few years.
Trees were selected for the current project because they constitute 25 percent of all plants; have economic value as sources of fuel, fiber, food, flowers and medicine; and produce nearly half the oxygen necessary for life on Earth. In the first phase of the project, scientists hope to barcode all the trees in Europe, half the trees in North American, and all threatened or endangered trees that are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
(image: US Botanic Garden Plant Barcode Exhibit, Feb. 2007)
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