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Capturing the DNA of life online - Guelph, Ontario
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Alex Smith - Assistant Professor, Biodiversity Institute of Ontario
“The Barcode of Life project is an endeavor that we are leading here at the University of Guelph, and in Canada, but it's a global initiative to attempt to produce DNA barcodes for all animal species.”
“All of that information right now is hosted on our website here, barcodinglife.org. We're right now hosting, and serving up all this information so that when people are curious about an ant they've collected in Madagascar, or in California, or here in Guelph - if they have DNA sequence information for that ant, they can't come here and figure out what it is.”
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Paul Hebert - Director, Biodiversity Institute of Ontario
“The Biodiversity Institute of Ontario grew as a consequence of joint support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry for Research and Innovation. That gave us the building, and we filled it with people, and we're busily registering biodiversity both in the province and globally.”
“That's now convinced the world that this is a worthwhile venture.”
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Christian Burks - CEO, Ontario Genomics Institute
“The Ontario Ministry for Research and Innovation was the first organization to step up and commit $5 million to getting this International Barcode of Life, or IBOL project off the ground.”
“This is going to be an international consortium - very exciting because it's going to have a tremendous impact on everything from tracking and monitoring endangered species, looking at industrial fouling, food purity - another great example - all of those applications are important to Ontario and Ontario's citizens.”
Alex Smith - Assistant Professor, Biodiversity Institute of Ontario
“In the last 6 years, this project has moved from one that was driven by the enthusiasm and drive of a single researcher to now where we're involving researchers from dozens of nations around the world, working on literally hundreds of thousands of specimens, from hundreds of different ecosystems in this attempt to capture all of the biodiversity information on the planet - in a single, searchable, digital package.”
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For more information visit: Ontario.ca/innovation