What is DNA barcoding and why should you care?

Imagine you're walking through Brisbane Water National Park and you spot a bracket fungus on a fallen eucalyptus log. It's brown on top, white underneath, with concentric zones. Could be Trametes versicolor (Turkey Tail), could be Trametes hirsuta, could be something else entirely. How do you know for sure?

Morphology — the shape, colour, and structure of the fruiting body — can get you close, but many species look almost identical. This is where DNA barcoding comes in.

The concept is simple

Every organism carries DNA that encodes its identity. Certain short, standardised genetic regions — 'barcodes' — evolve fast enough to distinguish between species but are flanked by conserved regions where universal primers can attach. By sequencing this barcode region and comparing it to a reference database, we can identify the species.

Different barcodes for different kingdoms

For fungi, the barcode is the ITS (Internal Transcribed Spacer) region — officially adopted in 2012 by the mycological community. For animals, it's COI (Cytochrome Oxidase I) — a mitochondrial gene. For plants, we need two markers: rbcL and matK, because no single plant gene is variable enough on its own. For bacteria, it's the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, which Carl Woese used to discover the entire domain Archaea.

Why it matters

DNA barcoding has revealed that 20-30% of commercially sold fish is mislabelled. It's identified poisonous mushroom species sold in markets. It's helped track invasive species, confirm conservation status, and discover thousands of species new to science. In Australia alone, an estimated 70-80% of fungi are undescribed — your backyard might contain species that have never been formally identified.

That's what our lab is here for. We make the molecular biology accessible so anyone — not just researchers with lab access — can find out what they've found.