University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![6thBOL logo
300x237](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IEzG0pQ5f8k/VeWDhGw2FOI/AAAAAAAAEBc/ffYjgac8iME/6thBOL-logo-300x237.png?imgmax=800 "6thBOL-logo-300x237.png"){border="0"
width="128" height="101" style="float:right;"} A little over a week ago
I was at the [6th International Barcode of Life
Conference](http://dnabarcodes2015.org), held at Guelph, Canada. It was
my first barcoding conference, and was quite an experience. Here are a
few random thoughts.

#### Attendees

It was striking how diverse the conference crowd was. Apart from a few
ageing systematists (including veterans of the cladistics wars), most
people were young(ish), and from all over the world. There clearly
something about the simplicity and low barrier to entry of barcoding
that has enabled its widespread adoption. This also helps give barcoding
a cohesion, no matter what the taxonomic group or the problem you are
tackling, you are doing much the same thing as everybody else (but see
below). While ageing systematists (like myself) may hold their noses
regarding the use of a single, short DNA sequence and a tree-building
method some would dismiss as \"phenetic\", in many ways the conference
was a celebration of global-scale phylogeography.

> Awesome drone footage from
> [\#DNAbarcodes2015](https://twitter.com/hashtag/DNAbarcodes2015?src=hash).
> Thanks to everyone who helped make this conference so fantastic!!!
> <https://t.co/37nYuIxGuz>
>
> --- Mike Wright (@MIKEisWRIGHT20) [August 22,
> 2015](https://twitter.com/MIKEisWRIGHT20/status/634897494791421952)

#### Standards aren\'t enough

And yet, standards aren\'t enough. I think what contributes to DNA
barcoding\'s success is that sequences are **computable**. If you have a
barcode, there\'s already a bunch of barcodes sequences you can compare
yours to. As others add barcodes, your sequences will be included in
subsequent analyses, analyses which may help resolve the identity of
what you sequenced.

To put this another way, we have standard image file formats, such as
JPEG. This means you can send me a bunch of files, safe in the knowledge
that because JPEG is a standard I will be able to open those files. But
this doesn\'t mean that I can do anything useful with them. In fact,
it\'s pretty hard to do anything with images part from look at them. But
if you send me a bunch of DNA sequences for the same region, I can build
a tree, BLAST GenBank for similar sequences, etc. Standards aren\'t
enough by themselves, to get the explosive growth that we see in
barcodes the thing you standardise on needs to be easy to work with, and
have a computational infrastructure in place.

#### Next generation sequencing and the hacker culture

Classical DNA barcoding for animals uses a single, short mtDNA marker
that people were sequencing a couple of decades ago. Technology has
moved on, such that we\'re seeing papers such as [An emergent science on
the brink of irrelevance: a review of the past 8 years of DNA
barcoding](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-0998.2012.03119.x). As I\'ve
argued earlier ([Is DNA barcoding
dead?](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-dna-barcoding-dead.html))
this misses the point about the power of standardisation on a simple,
scalable method.

At the same time, it was striking to see the diversity of sequencing
methods being used in conference presentations. Barcoding is a broad
church, and it seemed like it was a natural home for people interested
in environmental DNA. There was excitement about technologies such as
the Oxford Nanopore MinION™, with people eager to share tips and
techniques. There\'s something of a hacker culture around sequencing
(see also [Biohackers gear up for genome
editing](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/524398a)), just as there is for
computer hardware and software.

#### Community

> So this happened
> [\#dnabarcodes2015](https://twitter.com/hashtag/dnabarcodes2015?src=hash)
> [pic.twitter.com/EQ6OqNSTjn](http://t.co/EQ6OqNSTjn)
>
> --- Kevin Morey (@moreykev94) [August 21,
> 2015](https://twitter.com/moreykev94/status/634821767232626688)

The final session of the conference started with some community bonding,
complete with Paul Hebert versus Quentin Wheeler wielding light sables.
If, like me, you weren\'t a barcode, things started getting a little
cult-like. But there\'s no doubt that Paul\'s achievement in promoting a
simple approach to identifying organisms, and then translating that into
a multi-million dollar, international endeavour is quite extraordinary.

After the community bonding, came a wonderful talk by [Dan
Janzen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_H._Janzen). The room was
transfixed as Dan made the case for conservation, based on his own life
experiences, including [Area de Conservación
Guanacaste](http://www.protectedplanet.net/198296) where he and Winnie
Hallwachs have been involved since the 1970s. I sat next to Dan at a
dinner after the conference, and showed him
[iNaturalist](http://inaturalist.org), a great tool for documenting
biodiversity with your phone. He was intrigued, and once we found
pictures taken near his house in Costa Rica, he was able to identify the
individual animals in the photos, such as a bird that has since been
eaten by a snake.

#### Dark taxa

My own contribution to the conference was a riff on the notion of [dark
taxa](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/04/dark-taxa-genbank-in-post-taxonomic.html),
and mostly consisted of me trying think through how to respond to DNA
barcoding.

::: {style="text-align:center"}
::: {style="margin-bottom:5px"}
**[Two graphs, three
responses](//www.slideshare.net/rdmpage/two-graphs-three-responses "Two graphs, three responses"){target="_blank"}**
from **[Roderic Page](//www.slideshare.net/rdmpage){target="_blank"}**
:::
:::

The three responses to barcoding that I came up with are:

1.  By comparison to barcoding, classical taxonomy is digitally almost
    invisible, with great chunks of the literature still not scanned or
    accessible. So, one response is to try and get the core data of
    taxonomy digitised and linked as fast as possible. This is why I
    built [BioStor](http://biostor.org) and
    [BioNames](http://bionames.org), and why I continually rant about
    the state of efforts to digitise taxonomy.
2.  This is essentially President Obama\'s \"bucket\" approach, maybe
    the sane thing to do is see barcoding as the future and envisage
    what we could do in a sequence only world. This is not to argue that
    we should ignore the taxonomic literature as such, but rather lets
    start with sequences first and see what we can do. This is the
    motivation for my [Displaying a million DNA barcodes on Google Maps
    using
    CouchDB](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2014/03/displaying-dna-barcodes-on-google-maps.html),
    and my experiments with [Visualising Geophylogenies in Web Maps
    Using
    GeoJSON](http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/currents.tol.8f3c6526c49b136b98ec28e00b570a1e).
    These barely scratch the surface of what can be done.
3.  The third approach is to explore how we integrate taxonomy and
    barcoding at global scale, in which case linking at specimen level
    (rather, than, say using taxonomic names) seems promising, albeit
    requiring a massive effort to reconcile multiple specimen
    identifiers.

#### Summary

> [@rdmpage](https://twitter.com/rdmpage) Thanks for spreading the word!
> Looks like an interesting conference, which is a rare thing indeed.
>
> --- Nakensnegl (@kueda) [August 23,
> 2015](https://twitter.com/kueda/status/635281338623373312)

Yes, the barcoding conference was that rare thing, a well organised
(including well-fed), interesting, indeed eye-opening, conference.


A little over a week ago I was at the 6th International Barcode of Life Conference, held at Guelph, Canada. It was my first barcoding conference, and was quite an experience. Here are a few random thoughts.
<strong>
 Attendees
</strong>
It was striking how diverse the conference crowd was. Apart from a few ageing systematists (including veterans of the cladistics wars), most people were young(ish), and from all over the world.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

Dark taxa, drones, and Dan Janzen: 6th International Barcode of Life Conference