The Barcoding Enterprise:

CBOL’s view

for 2011 to 2015

Dr. Scott E. Miller, Chair

Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL)

Deputy Under Secretary for Collections

Smithsonian Institution

Washington, DC

www.barcodeoflife.org; MillerS@si.edu

Who Came to Adelaide?

463 delegates from 61 countries

Large representation by non-academic

sectors

– Government officials, regulatory agencies

– Private companies

– Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

ALA, Others from Biodiversity Informatics

Diverse with respect to:

Single, few, many barcoding projects/lab

Specimens from collections, fieldwork

Reasons for barcoding:

– 72% - Biodiversity inventories

– 52% - Phylogenetics

– 46% - Ecological applications

– 42% - Taxonomy

– 35% - Building the reference library

Diverse with respect to:

Personal/group labs, core facilities

Producing 10s, 100s, 1000s of barcodes

Relying on sequencing services from:

– 32% - Commercial sequencing service

– 29% - Canadian Centre for DNA barcoding

– 24% - Personal or group lab

– 28% - Institutional core facility

Data Release for Adelaide

379 abstracts being presented:

225 presenters responded to survey on

data for their presentations:

– 125 presenters have private BOLD data

– Of these, 88 have only private BOLD data

– 70 keep their data only on personal computers

– 60 have public GenBank records

– 44 more have unpublished GenBank data

– 18 have public BOLD data projects

Plant Barcoding Progress Acceleration of plant barcode studies

Assessment of matK and rbcL

Expansion of data on ITS

Application to illegal logging

64 Plant presentations in Adelaide

– More than Fish (55) and Fungi (38)

Implementation in GenBank delayed

Progress since Mexico City, 2009

Approval soon of standard Fungal Barcode

First adoption by government agency, the US

Food and Drug Administration (FDA);

– Angelo Ferrari’s poster on Italy’s FDA

Expanded use of next-generation

sequencing, especially analysis of mixtures

--Adelaide session on Environmental DNA

(18 presentations)

Expanded applications in ecology, evolution

Progress on Specimen Sources

Large-scale tissue mining projects in major

collections:

– Australian National Insect Collection, tens of

thousands of specimens

– USNM bird frozen tissue: 3000 specimens,

1147 newly barcoded species

– USNM and AMNH mammal frozen tissue

– CBS fungal collection

- Smithsonian National Zoo

– Discussions underway with many others

An Experiment in Museum Tissue

Mining and Fast Data Release

Bird frozen tissue sampling winter/spring

Sequencing completed in September

Sequence quality control in October

Taxonomic checking in early November

– Obvious errors removed

– Minor discrepancies remain

Data released for Adelaide Conference

- Fort Lauderdale Protocol for early data release

– Crowd-sourced annotation by community

– Will data be mis-used??

Progress on Informatics

Continued Barcoding leadership in

biodiversity informatics and cybertaxonomy

– Partnerships with GBIF, Encyclopedia of Life,

Atlas of Living Australia

– Biodiversity WG of Genomics Standards

Consortium

– e-Biosphere workshop (Copenhagen, July 2012)

and conference (London, March 2013)

BOLD 3.0 with group annotation

Biorepositories.org – approved Voucher IDs

Barcoding and the CBD

Recognition of Non-Commercial Research in

Nagoya Protocol, Access and Benefit Sharing

Memorandum of Understanding, iBOL-CBD

Barcoding Near a Tipping Point

Create partnerships with user communities

(government agencies, private companies)

Engage more major collections with frozen

tissue and younger identified specimens

Engage new collecting programs with

teams of taxonomists (e.g., Moorea)

Implement early and full data release,

embrace community-based data curation

(Fort Lauderdale Protocol)

Major Issues for Adelaide:

Scaling Up! iBOL and other projects have high goals for

building reference library:

– Can we find sufficient voucher specimens?

– Will vouchers have reliable species IDs? Role of

interim taxonomy and BINs?

– Will barcoding become a truly Open Science and

lead Biodiversity Informatics and cybertaxonomy?

– Will new core facilities, BOLD mirror databases

be built to increase global productivity?

– Role of NGS and other new technologies?

Sincere thanks to: – Andy Lowe and Local Organizing Committee

– Co-hosts, Sponsors, Exhibitors

– Presenters and other delegates

– CBOL Secretariat Staff

Celebrate our accomplishments

Remember our vision and mission

Be open to user communities, international

partners, education applications

Challenge each other to take risks