ABSTRACT
An inspector at a busy seaport, a hiker on a mountain trail, or a scientist in a lab could insert a sample containing DNA – a snippet of whisker, say, or the leg of an insect – into the device, which would detect the sequence of nucleic acids in the barcode segment. This information would be relayed instantly to a reference database, a public libr ary of DNA barcodes, which would respond with the specimen’s name, photograph and description. Anyone, anywhere, could identify species and could also learn whether some living thing belongs to a species no one has ever recognized before.
