Resumen de www.DNA-surveillance: applied molecular taxonomy for species conservation and discovery

C. Scott Baker, Merel L. Dalebout, Shane Lavery

• To address the full range of issues in biosurveillance and biodiversity, molecular taxonomy must encompass both traditional methods of museum curation and recent advances in bioinformatics [ 1 ]. DNA Surveillance attempts to bridge this gap for the identification of species threatened by exploitation or protected by international agreements (e.g. [ 2 ]). This web-based programme aligns a user-submitted gene sequence of unknown origin against a comprehensive set of reference sequences curated by species specialists [ 3 ]. Evolutionary distances and a phylogenetic tree with bootstrap simulations are used to judge species identity of the unknown ‘test’ sequence relative to the prealigned reference data set.