Hitskin.com

Subject: Barcoding Fri Jan 16, 2009 7:35 pm

Barcoding is the term applied to a technology that is being developed
to speed the identification of specimens of living things. So far,
identification and classification of animals has progressed furthest.

Although each individual in most species has a unique genome
sequence, the differences between individuals of one species are much
smaller than the differences between individuals of different species.
Thus determining the genome sequence of a specimen should enable it to
be positively classified if the sequences of other members of its
species are already in a database.

However, sequencing entire genomes of animals is an enormous
undertaking. (Most mammals have some 3 billion base pairs of DNA.) A
more practical approach is to settle on the sequence of a single gene
that is found in all animal life.

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