The Union Cabinet on October 7, 2020 apprised of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in June, 2020 between Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), a subordinate organization under Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and International Barcode of Life (iBOL), a Canadian not-for-profit corporation.
- ZSI and iBOL have come together for further efforts in DNA barcoding, a methodology for rapidly and accurately identifying species by sequencing a short segment of standardized gene regions and comparing individual sequences to a reference database.
- iBOL is a research alliance involving nations that have committed both human and financial resources to enable expansion of the global reference database, the development of informatics platforms, and/or the analytical protocols needed to use the reference library to inventory, assess, and describe biodiversity.
- The MoU will enable ZSI to participate at the Global level programmes like Bioscan and Planetary Biodiversity Mission.
What is DNA Barcoding?
DNA Barcoding is a tool for specimen identification and species discovery. The process involves:
- Isolate DNA from the sample
- Amplify the target DNA barcode region using PCR
- DNA is isolated from the sample.
- Compare the resulting sequences against reference databases to find the matching species
- Plant barcoding studies use one or a few plastid regions (e.g. rbcL and matK, and the non-coding spacer trnH-psbA) and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of nuclear ribosomal DNA.
- Animal barcoding studies use a region in the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 gene (“CO1”)
- Fungal barcoding studies use the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region in the nuclear ribosomal cistron. This region shows reasonable discriminatory power at the species level in many groups.
(Source: PIB and iBOL)
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