Scientists to capture DNA of trees worldwide for database

Dr. James Miller, Dean and Vice President for Science at The New York Botanical Garden, holds a plant specimen, collected in 1990 in Colombia, at the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory at the Bronx, New York facility Tuesday, April 15, 2008.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Botanical Garden may be best known for its orchid shows and colorful blossoms, but its researchers are about to lead a global effort to capture DNA from thousands of tree species from around the world.

The Bronx garden is hosting a meeting this week where participants from various countries will lay the groundwork for how the two-year undertaking to catalog some of the Earth's vast biodiversity will proceed.

The project is known as TreeBOL, or tree barcode of life. As in a similar project under way focusing on the world's fish species, participants would gather genetic material from trees around the world.

A section of the DNA would be used as a barcode, similar to way a product at the grocery store is scanned to bring up its price. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species. full story