
On the February 15, 2001, in the sciencemagazine Nature, a group of hundreds of scientists published the complete human genome. All 14.8 billion base pairs! This was an enormous undertaking and an enormous success. And, although this particular feat was about human genetics, the ramifications for conservation are similarly enormous.
The human genome project began in 1990 and ended in 2003, two years ahead of schedule. We now know the entire sequence of the human genetic code—but as some have said, that was “the end of the beginning.” Like most major scientific endeavors, the human genome project had many positive outcomes for other parts of science and human endeavor. The advancement of tools to perform DNA analysis has been a major boon to conservation and environmental sciences.
DNA analysis benefits conservation because finding, capturing, sampling and then releasing organisms unharmed is difficult at best, impossible in many situations. We know perhaps one-eighth of the world’s species based on traditional means—finding specimens in the wild and bringing them back to the lab. The pace of finding the rest of those species is excruciatingly slow.
But DNA provides a way to “see” what is living in an environment without actually collecting the specimens themselves. Because all organisms shed DNA into the environment, through feces, urine, exhalation and decomposition of dead tissue, the soil and water of a place are a treasure store of information. Called “environmental DNA,” samples of soil or water can be analyzed to profile all the DNA present—and assign it to known standards from specimens previously collected. If novel DNA is found, that represents species that still need to be identified.
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