DNA BarcodingHilo’s Donald Price and Elizabeth Stacy receive a $1.18 million grant to study biodiversity. Read moreCrohn’s Disease StudyManoa’s Amy Brown conducts a clinical trial on a Crohn’s Disease Diet. Read more
Engineering AwardsManoa’s Jeoffrey Cudiamat and Reece Iwami honored for achievements in engineering. Read more
KudosManoa’s Denise Antolini, Maureen Shannon and Amarjit Singh, Kapi'olani’s Robert Franco and Hilo’s Jacquelyn Pualani Johnson and Drew Martin. Read more
Analyzing the Local NewsHilo's Todd Belt co-authors We Interrupt this Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too. Read more
UH EventsMaui’s transition workshop, Hilo’s distinguished alumni awards dinner and Manoa’s career fair. Read more
Donald Price and students in the Big Island rainforest hunting Hawaiian picture-winged flies.
DNA Barcoding
The Moore Foundation provided a $1.18 million grant to Hilo Associate Professor Donald Price and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Stacy to study the biodiversity and genetics of several groups of Native Hawaiian plants and insects. The project will engage Hilo undergraduate and graduate students, technicians and post-doctoral associates.
The work by Price and Stacy builds on the Moore Foundation support of DNA barcoding and related biodiversity-based research in the Pacific. This barcoding project will use the Hawaiian Islands, and especially Hawai‘i island, as an evolutionary laboratory. Researchers will evaluate the utility of DNA barcoding for young species of plants and animals and identify additional DNA barcoding genes useful for these groups.
The Barcode of Life Initiative posits that species identification can be done using a short segment of DNA in the mitochondrial genome for animals and a similarly short segment of DNA in the plant’s chloroplast genome.
The principle behind DNA barcoding is simply that after a gene pool is segregated into two or more separate gene pools through the process of speciation, evolutionary factors working independently on these gene pools will cause genetic differences to accumulate between species. Further, some of these genetic differences will be species specific and, hence, once identified, will be useful for delineating species. It has become clear, however, that this “single-gene” approach to barcoding is not sufficient for delineating all species.