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DNA barcoding has been growing at an incredible rate since Paul Hebert first proposed it in 2003. Since that time, CBOL was created and has grown to include more than 170 Member Organizations in more than 50 countries around the world. An extraordinary array of barcoding initiatives has been launched and there’s now a long list of acronyms for different barcoding projects. There are three acronyms that are closely related and may have caused some confusion:

These three are closely related, of course, and CBOL would be an important part of iBOL if the funding proposal to Genome Canada is supported. CBOL has been asked to lead the Communications and Outreach activities for iBOL.

One of the things that CBOL’s Member Organizations have asked for consistently is help in explaining DNA barcoding to government officials involved in research funding and granting permits for collecting and transferring biological specimens. Barcoding can become an international standard for documenting, managing, and protecting biodiversity and CBOL has been active in its outreach efforts, including:

As you’ll read in this newsletter, CBOL recently held a side-event on Access and Benefit Sharing at the CBD Conference of the Parties in Bonn, Germany, at which we distributed the new DNA barcoding brochure. We’re now organizing an international workshop on “Basic Research and Access and Benefit Sharing”, at which we’ll explore the benefits of basic biodiversity research (including barcoding) and its importance to developing countries.

CBOL’s Executive Committee will soon begin discussing our plans for the Third International Barcode of Life Conference. We plan to hold the conference in late 2009 and we’ll be announcing the place and dates within the next few months.

CBOL tries to be both a bottom-up and a top-down organization. I hope you'll continue to be interested in our work and will keep sending us your ideas for new barcoding initiatives.

CBOL invites Member Organizations in North, Central, and South America to express their interest in hosting the Third International Barcode of Life Conference in late 2009 by contacting David Schindel. Expressions of interest should include the name and contact information for a potential chair of a Local Organizing Committee that would work with CBOL to organize the conference. CBOL's Executive Committee has decided to hold its next conference in the western hemisphere because the first two international conferences have been held in London and Taiwan, and several regional meetings have been held in Africa.

CBOL recently held meetings of the Data Analysis Working Group (DAWG) and Leading Labs Network (LLN) in San Diego on 23-25 June 2008 (see meeting report). DAWG has been promoting the development of new analytical approaches and software for barcode data, and many of you saw the first demonstrations of their deliverables at the Taipei conference last fall. In San Diego, they refined their plans to finish their software packages and put them on the ‘BOLI Data Portal’ that CBOL is developing. They’ll be holding a ‘Hack-A-Thon’ in November at which they hope to get all the kinks worked out of their software.

LLN now includes more than 15 labs in 10 countries, and they are developing lab and data management protocols for all stages of the barcoding process. They plan to prepare text files of the protocols and instructional videos, and to put these resources on a LLN portal along with a Wiki system for community interactions.

CBOL is one of the major co-sponsors, along with the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and the Natural History Museum (London) of e-Biosphere 09: The International Conference of Biodiversity Informatics (1-5 June 2009, London). The Conference will provide an opportunity to present the BOLI Data Portal to the biodiversity informatics community, and to highlight how DNA barcode data fit into the wider network of biodiversity data. The e-Biosphere 09 Conference promises to be a milestone for CBOL and barcoding.

CBOL’s Implementation Board (IB) met for the first time in San Diego, immediately following the DAWG and LLN meetings. The IB is made up of the leaders of CBOL’s activities, along with representatives of important partners such as GenBank, BOLD, and iBOL. The IB replaced CBOL’s Scientific Advisory Board in late 2007 as a way to increase collaboration across activities. Members of the IB were enthusiastic about the planned BOLI Data Portal and online LLN resources.

I’m sure the next two years will be busy and productive ones in the Secretariat Office. Please feel free to send us your questions and comments at CBOLInfo@si.edu.

Mike Trizna, CBOL’s data management specialist, is working with the Data Analysis Working Group to develop a Data Portal for the Barcode of Life Initiative (BOLI). The BOLI Data Portal will be an online resource for creating custom datasets of barcode records and submitting them to the new analytical routines that DAWG is developing.

Kristin Jett, CBOL’s Program Assistant, is helping the Leading Labs Network develop an online resource for the BOLI community. It will have standard protocols for working in the field and lab, instructional videos, and a wiki for interacting with other barcoders. Kristin is also managing the online registry of biorepositories and collections (www.biorepositories.org) that is creating a stable system for linking barcode records to their voucher specimens.

CBOL has engaged Dr. Lucie Rogo as a consultant and advisor for special projects. Lucie helped to develop the new CBOL brochure and she is developing plans for a regional barcode meeting in west/central Africa. Lucie is an entomologist and has held research positions at the Smithsonian and Brown University. She has worked for ICIPE in Nairobi, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and BioNET-INTERNATIONAL.

CBOL’s Secretariat Office bid a sad farewell to Agnes Balla, who began a graduate degree program in public health at Johns Hopkins University. Agnes joined CBOL as an intern in 2006 and was hired immediately afterwards as Program Assistant. She became a critical member of the Secretariat staff and we know she has a great future as a researcher.

CBOL’s Executive Committee sets the priorities and strategic direction for the Consortium, and is responsible for overseeing the Secretariat Office and all CBOL activities. The Committee includes the Chair and Principal Investigator of the CBOL grant from the Sloan Foundation (Scott Miller, Smithsonian Institution, USA), the Executive Secretary who is chosen by the Executive Committee (David Schindel), and five individuals nominated by CBOL’s Member Organizations. Helida Oyieke (National Museums of Kenya) and Simon Tillier (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) have been members of the Executive Committee since June 2005 and their terms will expire in June 2009. (See CBOL’s Terms of Reference for more information.)

Dr. Kwang-Tsao Shao, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan Many of you will remember Dr. Shao as the Chairman of the Second International Barcode of Life Conference in Taipei in September 2007. Dr. Shao is an ichthyologist and Research Fellow of the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica. He was the Center’s Acting Director for several years and stepped down from that position in 2008. He has been Director of the Institute of Zoology, Academia Sinica and the Institute of Marine Biology, National Taiwan Ocean University, as well as Chairman of the Icthyological Society of Taiwan, China Biological Society, and Cetacean Society of Taiwan. Dr. Shao now serves as the Executive Secretary of IUBS/DIVERSTAS/GBIF, National Committee of R.O.C. He received his Ph.D. from Department of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY at Stony Brook in 1983 and is interested in fish taxonomy, ecology, evolution and database works. Currently he is devoting himself to integrating biodiversity databases, and promoting sustainable fisheries, marine protected areas and marine conservation in Taiwan..

Dr. Ione Egler, Ministry of Science and Technology, Brasilia, Brazil Dr. Egler has worked for 25 years in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of intersectoral policies, programs and projects, with special emphasis on environmental, science and technology sectors. She has held managerial and executive positions in the Ministries of Environment and Science and Technology since 1990, and she is currently the Senior Adviser at the Executive Secretariat at the Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil. Dr. Egler is Brazil’s contact point for the Global Taxonomy Initiative of the Convention on Biological Diversity and she serves on Brazil’s delegations to CBD and SBSTTA. Currently she is involved in supporting a national project to develop a system to integrate biodiversity databases and maintain such a system over the long term. Dr. Egler received her Ph.D. degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK and was a lecturer in the Centre on Sustainable Development (CDS) for the Federal University of Brasília from 1998 to 2005.

Dr. Jorge Soberón, Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA Dr. Soberón is now a Senior Scientist and a Professor in the Division of Ornithology at the Museum of the University of Kansas. Before coming to Kansas he served for more than a decade as Executive Secretary of the National Commission on Biodiversity of Mexico (CONABIO). In that role, Dr. Soberón was also heavily involved in biodiversity policy and diplomacy and participated in the Biodiversity Convention (CBD) Conferences of the Parties, a large number of its peripheral meetings, and other biodiversity-related international meetings and negotiations. His current research interests are the description and modeling of biodiversity patterns at a geographical scale, with the goal of understanding the causes of species distributions, fundamental niches, migration and evolution, and patterns of alpha and beta diversity. Dr. Soberón was trained as a theoretical population ecologists, first in the National University of Mexico and then in Imperial College, UK, where he obtained his Ph.D.

Plant Working Group The Steering Committee of CBOL’s Plant Working Group will be meeting at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, on 25-26 September 2008. Members of the Steering Committee have been collecting data for the candidate gene regions being considered as potential plant barcodes. The Edinburgh meeting will be devoted to analyzing these data and preparing a proposal to CBOL for the selected barcode regions.

Regional Meeting in West/Central Africa CBOL is working with the National Biotechnology Development Agency of Nigeria to organize a regional barcode meeting for west and central Africa. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for 24-25 October 2008 in Abuja, Nigeria. This meeting will be the fifth outreach meeting that CBOL has held for developing countries. Contact Lucie Rogo for additional information.

International Workshop on Basic Research and Access and Benefit Sharing CBOL is organizing a week-long workshop that is being co-sponsored by six other organizations concerned with Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). The meeting will take place in Bonn, Germany, on 14-19 November 2008 and participants are being selected by a Steering Committee. The goal of the workshop will be to identify ABS policies that promote basic, non-commercial biodiversity research while protecting the genetic property rights of countries of origin. Contact David Schindel for additional information.

ArBOL, Bogotá, Colombia The University of the Andes will host the ArBOL meeting, devoted to organizing a barcoding initiative on the tree species of Central and South America. Tropical hardwood tree species was one of the priority projects identified by a regional barcode meeting for South and Central America held in Campinas, Brazil in March 2007 (see meeting report). Since that time, the TreeBOL initiative has been organized by the New York Botanical Garden which is co-sponsoring the ArBOL meeting. The meeting is scheduled tentatively for 30-31 October 2008 in Bogotá, Colombia. Contact Santiago Madriñán for additional information.

CBOL and many other organizations are involved in a proposal for a $150 million International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) being organized by the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO). The iBOL project is being planned as a global network of central, regional, and national nodes that will contribute specimens and data to a global barcode database. BIO is submitting a $25 million proposal to Genome Canada's International Consortium Initiative and funding could being as early as July 2009. CBOL will be actively involved in iBOL and has been asked to lead its Communications and Outreach activity.

CBOL leadership meeting CBOL held four days of meetings on 23-26 June 2008 in San Diego, California (see meeting report). CBOL’s Leading Labs Network and Data Analysis Working Group met for two days to plan their programs of work for 2008-2010. CBOL’s new Implementation Board (IB) met for the first time for two days. The IB consists of the chairs of all CBOL Working Groups, Committees, and initiatives, as well as representatives from other organizations that are critical to barcoding (especially GenBank, BOLD, the Canadian Barcode of Life Network).

Sloan Foundation supports indoor fungi barcoding project The Sloan Foundation approved a grant to the University of California Berkeley in June 2008 for a barcoding study of indoor fungi related to human health hazards. The co-PIs on the study are Tom Bruns (Berkeley), Rob Samson (CBS, Netherlands), and Keith Seifert (Agriculture Canada and University of Ottawa).

BeeBOL Inaugural Workshop Laurence Packer at York University in Toronto organized and hosted a Bee Barcode of Life (BeeBOL; www.bee-bol.org) inaugural workshop for 15 participants on 12-14 May 2008. Laurence and several others involved in BeeBOL then participated in a Global Pollinator Summit on 1-4 July 2008. The Summit was held in conjunction with the International Congress of Entomologists and was co-sponsored by CBOL, GBIF, and the US National Science Foundation.

CBD Side-Event CBOL organized and sponsored a side-event on 26 May 2008 in Bonn, Germany, at the Ninth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Approximately 30 CBD participants attended this roundtable discussion on “An ABS Regime for Non-Commercial Biodiversity Research”.

TreeBOL The Tree Barcode of Life project held its inaugural meeting at the New York Botanical Garden on 1-2 May 2008. TreeBOL received a two-year grant from the Sloan Foundation in early 2008 and the meeting began the planning process leading to a global barcode library for 30,000 species of trees. Contact Damon Little at NYBG for additional information.

All-Fungi Barcoding Initiative A Strategy Planning Meeting for the All-Fungi Barcoding Initiative was held at the University of Toronto on 30 April 2008. Ursula Eberhardt (CBS, Netherlands) has agreed to be the representative of this initiative to CBOL’s Implementation Board. For more information contact Tom Bruns at UC Berkeley, Keith Seifert at Ag Canada, or Rob Samson at CBS.

Canadian Barcode of Life Network Scientific Symposium The Canadian Barcode of Life Network held its 2nd Scientific Symposium on 28-29 April 2008 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. The Symposium brought together 170 participants for presentations and discussions of the progress being made on barcoding Canada’s species. A policy workshop involving industrial and government representatives was also included in the Symposium’s agenda.

Scale Insect Barcoding Initiative (SIBI) The South African Department of Agriculture recently made a US$400,000 grant for a barcoding study of the scale insects of Africa. This project began with a recommendation from CBOL’s first regional barcode outreach meeting, held in Cape Town, South Africa in April 2006 (see meeting report).

The CBOL website offers a list of barcoding publications, many with links to the full articles. Here are a few highlights from the list of recent articles:

Identifying Canadian Freshwater Fishes through DNA Barcodes by N. Hubert and others appeared in PLoS ONE vol. 3(6):e2490. It announced the public release of almost 1,500 GenBank records representing 95% of Canada's freshwater fish species. All of the records complied with CBOL's BARCODE data standards. PLoS has expressed interest in publishing other papers that announce the public release of significant bodies of BARCODE data.

The front page of the NY Times of 21 August 2008 carried a story entitled “Fish Tale Has DNA Hook: Students Find Bad Labels”. The story reports on a DNA barcoding investigation by two NY high school students (one of them the daughter of Dr. Mark Stoeckle, Coordinator of CBOL’s All Birds Barcoding Initiative). The study, published in Pacific Fishing magazine and subsequently labeled “SushiGate”, demonstrated that half the restaurants and 60% of the markets that were sampled in the study were selling fish with incorrect species identifications. For example, inexpensive tilapia was being sold as much more expensive white tuna. The story has appeared in scores of other newspapers around the world and has been reported on television and radio news. The SushiGate story was possible because of FISH-BOL, the all fish barcoding initiative that CBOL helped to start in 2005 and has supported since then. The FISH-BOL database recently passed the 5000 species milestone on its way to barcoding the approximately 30,000 known species of marine, freshwater, and estuarine fish. FISH-BOL operates through eleven Regional Working Groups and more than one hundred participating fish taxonomists who are submitting their data to the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) at the University of Guelph. The SushiGate samples that were collected by the students were analyzed in the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph. These samples were part of a larger study published in Food Research International by Eugene Wong and Robert Hanner.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now exploring DNA barcoding as a potential replacement for isoelectric focusing as the agency’s standard for species identification. FDA is routinely asked to identify fish in forms that are hard to identify such as filets. In addition to defrauding consumers, species substitution can be a public health hazard, such as when toxic species like pufferfish are sold under another name. FDA is in the process of constructing a reference barcode library for commercial fish and FISH-BOL is actively involved in the project.