Upper Green River Barcode of Life Project

Bio 175 Honors University Experience Class Project

Identifying species on the basis of morphology can be an extremely challenging task. Many species can only be identified by an expert familiar with the intimate details of an organism's biology. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are trained in traditional techniques of species identification and taxonomy.

To counteract this trend and to make species identification more straightforward for a large number of researchers, an international consortium of investigators has started to collect a standard set of DNA sequences for all species of organisms. By sequencing the same gene for all species, the sequence of that gene can serve as a unique "barcode" or identifier. This collaborative effort has become known as the Barcode of Life Project.