Society of Systematic Biologists

As in last week’s post on what deep-water sharks eat, DNA-based species identification helps reveal how animals live, not just what species they are. Diet analysis can also provide a survey of what prey/food species are in the local environment. In April 2010 Diversity, researchers from Université Grenoble, France, apply standardized DNA identification targeting chloroplast [...]

350 years ago Anthony van Leeuwenhoek explored the living world around (and within!) him using tiny, powerful, single lens microscopes. He discovered “tiny animacules” including what we now know as protozoa and bacteria, and detailed structures of plant and animal tissues.  In a similar way, DNA study can reveal features of the living world that [...]

In yesterday’s post I placed “integrative taxonomy” on a spectrum with morphologic taxonomy at one end and “DNA taxonomy” as applied to eubacteria/archaebacteria at the other. Mehrdad Hajibabaei pointed out that bacterial diversity is not partitioned into species in the same way it is in animals and plants. Eubacteria/archaebacteria have relatively fluid genomes with frequent [...]

Species are the units of biodiversity. Discontinuities in biological variation sort organisms into discrete groups that we recognize as species, and so gathering data on differences among organisms is the necessary first step in understanding the diversity of life. Here DNA has singular value–all organisms have DNA and some genetic loci are widely-shared, enabling direct [...]

Identifying marine life is a major challenge. On land, nearly all animals visible without a microscope are in one of two phyla: Chordata or Arthropoda, the latter most often represented by insects.  In contrast, many ancient lineages are present in the oceans. Abundant marine phyla with well-known representatives include Mollusca (molluscs), Porifera (sponges), Cnidaria (corals, [...]

The most successful technologies generate money. In turn, a commercial market helps drive improvements in cost and speed, enabling wider applications and new scientific knowledge. The rapid completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) can be seen as a direct result of Applied Biosystems ABI 3700 DNA analyzer, the first fully automated capillary sequencer, introduced [...]

In the late 1860′s, a French entomologist, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, living in Medford, Massachusetts, imported gypsy moths (Lymantria dispar) which he hoped to hybridize with domesticated Asian silkworms (Bombyx mori), thereby creating a new silk-producing strain with improved disease resistance (for history, see US Forest Service page). The experiment failed (not surprising given moths are [...]

How many birds in the world? In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) (copy in US Library of Congress can be viewed or downloaded here, thanks to Biodiversity Heritage Library), Linnaeus listed 564 species collected from all over the world. In 1935, Ernst Mayr estimated 8,500 world birds, and counted more precisely in 1946, [...]