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Barcodes will stop bushmeat from being swiped

Science is gradually making the work of illegal bushmeat traders more difficult. The DNA "ID tags" of African red river hog and 13 other species of illegally traded bushmeat animals have been added to an online database, making it more straightforward for conservationists to check the provenance of meat at markets.

The Barcode of Life database already contains the barcodes of thousands of species, but the biologists hope the new additions – which also include the spectacled caiman and the slender-snouted crocodile – will start a "bushmeat chapter" in the database.

"A genetic barcode identifies species in the same way that a product bar code in a supermarket distinguishes among brands," says Mitchell Eaton, who is based at the US Geologic Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland. Eaton and a team of scientists went to Africa to collect tissue and blood samples from wild animals and easily identifiable dead ones on sale at market stalls.

Back at the American Museum of Natural History, which supported the research, they extracted DNA from the animals and sequenced a 650 base pair mitochondrial gene known as COX1, which in mammals is used as a standardised genetic "barcode". The COX1 gene mutates fast enough to differ between species but slowly enough to be shared by individuals within a species.

Raising the barcode

This is the first time that scientists have sequenced the COX1 region in some species traded as bushmeat. "By matching the DNA sequences of animal products like meat and hide that cannot be identified to our database of genetic barcodes, conservationists will now know whether the animal killed was endangered or not," says Eaton, who has made the barcodes freely available on the database.

"Legally, if you want to take someone to court and prosecute them for selling bushmeat, you have to have genetic evidence to back you up so having a library of barcodes for illegally killed animals is an essential first step," says Mark Stoeckle, a DNA barcoding expert at the Rockefeller University in New York. "That said, sequencing DNA takes time and money and you need a lab to do it, so we're still a long way off from instant species identification."

Paul Hebert, a biologist from the University of Guelph in Canada, who devised the concept of a genetic barcode for every living organism, envisages a DNA barcode reader, similar to the scanners at retail checkouts, allowing anyone, anywhere to identify a species. A prototype of this hand-held scanner is currently being developed by Babak Parviz at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Journal reference: Conservation Genetics, DOI 10.1007/s10592-009-9967-0



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