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Brooklyn Botanic Garden Scientists Respond to New York Times Article "A Species in a Second: Promise of DNA 'Bar Codes'"
December 16, 2004
To the Editor:
As head of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Science Department, which concentrates on plant taxonomy, I read Tuesday's article, "A Species in a Second: Promise of DNA ‘Bar Codes'" with interest.
While it's true that "Less than a fifth of the earth's [estimated] 10 million species of plants and animals have been cataloged, and taxonomists are backlogged with requests to apply their specialist knowledge to identification problems," bar coding will never be a replacement for taxonomic studies. Whenever taxonomists have tried to classify organisms using one or few, universal character sources, such as chromosome numbers, chemical makeup, or DNA gene sequences, they have found the living world to be more complicated than initially thought.
Nevertheless, I agree that bar coding has the potential to provide non-taxonomists with a means to quickly identify a wide range of species, but only after the underlying classification has been established using more rigorous scientific methods.
In addition, the availability of a handheld device to quickly identify unknown organisms is not restricted to DNA sampling devices, indeed the technology exists to create them today. At Brooklyn Botanic Garden, we are developing such a tool for handheld PDA's that will enable the user to identify the plants of the New York metropolitan region using the characters in front of them, be they leaves, flowers or fruit. But creating such a device relies upon Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 15 years of intensive study of the metropolitan region's plants. Any sort of easily usable identification device, whether DNA barcode readers or PDA interactive keys, must be built upon the taxonomic research that has gone before.
Steven Clemants, Ph.D.
Vice President of Science
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Dec. 16, 2004