Placosternus guttatus
The largest DNA library in the world resides at the Centre of Biodiversity Genomics (CBG) at the University of Guelph, Canada. CBG is a long-time collaborator with GDFCF and Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG); Costa Rica—largely thanks to Drs. Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs and the parataxonomists—holds the global record of the most DNA barcode records by country. Fittingly, the 15 millionth specimen in CBG’s archive is a tiny beetle from ACG—a Placosternus guttatus long-horned beetle! “It’s a nice milestone to achieve,” said Dr. Paul Hebert, CBG’s founder and CEO, who pioneered the method of DNA barcoding. “It puts us in the upper ranks of collections in Canada and we’re within stretch distance of some of the world’s largest collections.” It took 15 years for the archive to reach 5 million species, and five more years to triple that number. “There’s nowhere that has more organisms digitally registered than we have at U of G,” Hebert says. “This is a brave new digital world. And we want all of humanity to have access to the specimen images, their sequences and geographical coordinates.” The goal of CBG is to collect, digitize and sequence every multi-cellular species on the planet. They process around 50,000 specimens each week. The larger goal of the work, adds Hebert, is to explain biodiversity, as well as to track how humans are altering it. “We’re living in a time of potential mass extinction,” he says. “The thought of losing all these species without preserving them so we can read their genomes is something humanity would regret for a long time.” You can read the article in the University of Guelph news here.