international online community for dna barcoding professionals
Toyota Enviro Outreach 2010 in South Africa– Plant side of the project
A fleet of Toyota (10 Toyota Hilux pickups) carrying South African and Canadian researchers will set out from the University of Johannesburg September 20 on a 17-day expedition to document
South Africa’s animal and plant species.
Our Goal:
Our goal is simple (but important) to have a complete database of DNA barcodes for all South Africa’s plant species. This database will allow scientists in the
future to be able to identify plants by matching the DNA barcodes of plants
that they collect to that of plants that are already in the database.
What will we collect?
Basically every plant that we will encounter during the 17-day fieldtrip but priority will be given to indigenous and endemic flowering plants. At least three
individuals/plants from different localities will be sampled for genetic
studies. We will pick a couple of young leaves per plant and then dried it in
silica gel for DNA studies. We will also prepare two herbarium vouchers. In
other words a piece of the plant (with flowers and/or fruits) will be pressed
in a plant press and dried in an oven for identification and storage in the
herbarium (one voucher will be kept at UJ and the other will be sent to a
national herbarium in South Africa).
The Team:
We have a well experience team mostly consisting of researcher and postgraduate students from UJ (Michelle van der Bank, Olivier Maurin, Solome Malgas, Mark Cooper,
Ledile Mankga, Bruce Kyalangalilwa and Jephris Gere). Masha Kuzmina from the
Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, Canada will join the plant barcoding team.
UJ have a long working relationship with Masha starting back in 2008: first
with the Kruger Park Project and later on with TreeBOL Africa.
To read more on the team and the project visit http://www.toyotaoutreach.com
Views: 14
Comment
-
Comment by Kris Jett on November 4, 2010 at 10:36am -
Hi Olivier,
Beautiful website! Very neat and orderly. And you seem to be getting the hang of the community website rather well. It'd be great to see a follow-up blog from your trip-- some of us are dying to know how it went.
Best wishes,
Kris
-
Comment by Olivier Maurin on October 26, 2010 at 2:40am -
Hello Kris and Andrew,
Many thanks for your posts. Michelle and I really appreciate your support to our projects, and are very gratefull for this.
I must admit, I am not so confident in the use of community website such as BarcodeofLife (or Facebook type), so I apologize for the lack of follow up.
I however want to bring to your attention that in order to "communicate" and inform on our activities we have recently setup a new website for our laboratory. The address is www.acdb.co.za
The website still need to be improved, but it is already looking quiet good ( I think).
On the acdb.co.za,you will have access to:
-The people involved in DNA barcoding with University of JoBurg and their field of interests.
-Scientific publications and press releases
-The DNA bank, that would in the next few days be linked to scans of herbarium vouchers
-TreeBOL Africa
-The Cheringoma project and the virtual Herbarium for trees and Mozambique
- other kind of informations.
In the coming weeks, we will also include a menu with information for people and institution that wish to get some advise on getting involved in DNA barcoding.
I hope you will be able to visit the website and I would be happy to get feedback. Any suggestion would be great so we can improve it.
With best wishes
Olivier
-
Comment by Iloh Andrew Chibuzor on October 25, 2010 at 12:36pm -
kris i have just read the atricle, Michelle and Olivier are doing a great job. Congrats guys
-
Comment by Kris Jett on October 25, 2010 at 10:48am
-
Hi Olivier,
The following news article popped up in my GoogleAlerts this morning: http://www.iol.co.za/news/science/expedition-nets-10-000-plus-speci... . I've added it to the 'In the News' section of Connect, but thought you might like to know.
Great job!
-
Comment by Iloh Andrew Chibuzor on September 15, 2010 at 7:26am
-
Nice One Olivier,
Enjoy the field trip and i trust you guys!!! you are very good at what you do. "BARCODING"
© 2012 Created by Matthew Fisher.
Powered by 
.
You need to be a member of Connect.BarcodeofLife.net to add comments!
Join Connect.BarcodeofLife.net