Better barcoding: New library of DNA sequences improves plant identification
Thursday, March 16, 2017 - 09:01
in Biology & Nature
The ability to identify individual plant species from tiny amounts of material has a surprising range of uses, from monitoring bee populations to assessing the contents of food and nutritional supplements, as well as working out what a herbivore had for breakfast. Classifying fragments of plants can be tricky, so researchers at Emory University have developed a new database of genetic information that can be used with the latest DNA sequencing technologies to improve the accuracy of plant identification.