Nearly four hundred experts in genomics, taxonomy, electronics and informatics from 50 countries are meeting these days in Mexico to agree on a new system for identifying species based on DNA, the "Bar Code of Life" (CBOL) . The organizers of this III International Conference estimate that there could be between 12 and 15 million species on the planet, of which only between 1.5 and 2 million have been classified over 250 years of taxonomy development.
The new classification aims to eliminate these deficiencies. For this, a very short genetic segment will be used compared to the complete genome "which can be easily identified in all species". With the technology of the barcode of life, it will be possible to identify and distinguish known and unknown species quickly, cheaply, easily and accurately. Up to now there are approximately 600 thousand sequences of some 50 thousand species in the Bank of Life Datasystem (BOLD), the database associated with this international open access project. The challenge now is to classify 500,000 species in five years, in the period 2010-2015.
In addition, it is planned to develop a Handheld Barcoder , a manual device that, with a small sample of an animal, plant or other organism tissue, allows the barcode of a certain species to be identified in record time and at a minimum cost of 2 at $ 3 per test.
