DNA 'Barcodes' Database

career building and development network www.careerbd.net
To help shoppers avoid mislabeled toxic pufferfish and pilots steer clear of birds, federal agencies are starting to tap into an ambitious project that is gathering DNA "barcodes" for the Earth's 1.8 million known species.

A consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations is overseeing the building of a global database made from tiny pieces of genetic material. Called DNA barcoding, the process takes a scientist only a few hours in a lab and about $2 to identify a species from a tissue sample or other piece of genetic material.

David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said the purpose is to create a global reference library — "a kind of telephone directory for all species."

"If I know that gene sequence, I can submit it as a query to a database and get back the telephone number," he said. "I can get back the species name."

The government's interest in the project stems from a variety of possible uses.

The Food and Drug Administration has begun eyeing it as a tool to ferret out hazardous fish species and to confirm a type of leech used in some surgery. In May, the FDA used it to warn that a shipment labeled monkfish from China might actually be a type of pufferfish that could contain a deadly toxin if not prepared properly.

The Federal Aviation Administration and Air Force hope it will help them identify birds prone to collide with aircraft. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sees it as a means to track commercial fish and reduce killing of unwanted species also caught by nets.

A growing collection of feathers and other remains of birds that collided with planes has provided "operational" information for the FAA, said Scott Miller, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution who chairs the consortium's executive committee.

"They have an almost complete reference database for the North American bird species," Miller said. "It is a routine tool that they use."

Elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency is testing species barcoding to identify insects and other invertebrates that indicate how healthy rivers and streams are. The Agriculture Department is contributing genetic data it has compiled on fruit flies in an effort help farmers control pests.

Among the agencies experimenting with the database, EPA has found that as it grows in size it is becoming "more and more useful as a practical tool for identifying species," EPA spokeswoman Jessica Emond said.

Scientists call it barcodes to compare it to the supermarket scanner codes that are indecipherable except to machines. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.

Users gain free access to a repository of archival genetic material run jointly by U.S., European and Japanese facilities.

About 30,000 species have been logged in the database so far, but scientists hope to reach 500,000 within five years. A two-year goal is to have sequenced 2,800 — or about 80 percent — of the 3,500 different species of mosquitoes.

Yvonne-Marie Linton of the Natural History Museum in London, said efforts to reduce mosquito populations blamed for up to 500 million human malaria cases and 1 million annual deaths each year are consistently hindered by misidentifying the species responsible.

Linton, who heads a project to barcode the mosquito species, said correctly identifying and controlling those carriers of malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever and the West Nile virus are the "key to disease management."

Miller said barcoding is "basically going to revolutionize the way that mosquito survey and monitoring is done."

The consortium is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. It grew out of 2003 research paper in which geneticist Paul Hebert at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, proposed a database of DNA barcodes for identifying all species. Now, the Smithsonian and university share in the barcoding work.

more

Blog content tracking firm is owning by YAHOO

build your career with www.careerbd.net .

Yahoo, looking to attract visitors and advertisers to its online news pages, purchased BuzzTracker, a site that ranks stories based on their popularity among bloggers.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo acquired the Web company's technology and staff from Chicago-based Participate Media, BuzzTracker said Friday on its blog. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

BuzzTracker ranks more than 1,000 topics on more than 90,000 blogs, displaying the most-read and discussed stories of the day, according to its Web site. The technology will add to Yahoo's news pages and help it fend off competition from Google and sites such as Digg.com.

"As anyone playing in the online media space understands, online media is all about scale," Warms said on the blog.

Yahoo's news page attracted 35.2 million users in June, the most among similar sites in the United States, according to comScore. Google was sixth with 9.28 million, the Reston, Va.-based research firm said.

The acquisition includes "substantially all of Participate's assets," Warms said in an interview. The company has four employees.

The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher reported Friday on her blog that the BuzzTracker purchase price was $5 million, citing sources close to the company.

Warms and Yahoo spokeswoman Bahareh Ramin declined to confirm the price.

Locals make Yahoo! news Participate Media, a two-year-old Internet software and publishing company based in Lake View, was acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount, and its owner, Alan Warms, was named general manager of Yahoo! News.
Participate Media developed BuzzTracker software that aggregates news, blog postings and other forms of Internet-based content from more than 90,000 sources. Publishers license the software, which can rank content according to what is most blogged or recently posted.

The four-person company also operates the Web site BuzzTracker.com.

Warms, 41, a Chicago-based serial entrepreneur, was named a Yahoo! vice president, and will move to Santa Monica, Calif. The company's employees will also relocate and work from the Yahoo! News headquarters. Yahoo.com is the most-visited Web site in the world.

"Anything in Internet media and advertising involves the ability to scale," Warms said. "We think we have the opportunity to bring in millions of users and thousands of advertisers."

Warms previously ran political news aggregator RealClearPolitics.com, which he sold in January. RealClearPolitics is a content partner of Yahoo, and technology developed for that Web site laid the groundwork for BuzzTracker. Accordingly, Yahoo management was familiar with the technology and in the process of negotiating a licensing agreement with BuzzTracker when it elected to acquire the company.

"This is very congruent with our strategy to make Yahoo an open platform," said Scott Moore, Yahoo senior vice president for news and information. "BuzzTracker augments our ability to search for the best of blogs and mainstream media by topic."

Warms founded his first company, Participate.com, in Chicago in 1997. That company, separate from his most recent venture, raised several million dollars in venture capital, and nearly went public before the dot-com crash in April 2000. Later named Participate Systems, it was sold in November 2004 to Boston-based OutStart Inc.

A native of New Jersey, Warms moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s to attend the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University.

Warms said Yahoo was an opportunity he couldn't pass up.

"They are the biggest player in news," he said. "If you have the chance to join the New York Yankees you have to do it."

Technorati : YAHOO