This Blog Is Powered By Life Technology™. Visit Life Technology™ At www.lifetechnology.com Subscribe To This Blog Via Feedburner / Atom 1.0 / RSS 2.0.
Monday 21 October 2019
Comparisons of 4.7 million mtDNA sequences show GenBank is reliable for animal IDs
Did a murderer walk through the room? Did a shark just swim by? Is this a poisonous mushroom? Which reef species are lost when the coral dies? These questions can potentially be answered quickly and cheaply based on tiny samples of DNA found in the environment. But identifying DNA requires a trustworthy library of previously identified DNA sequences for comparison. Smithsonian scientists and their colleagues analyzed more than 4.7 million animal DNA sequences from GenBank, the most commonly used tool for this purpose, and discovered that animal identification errors are surprisingly rare—but sometimes quite funny.