The Consortium for the Barcode of Life and Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, organized the Second International Barcode of Life Conference. The conference was held from September 17th – 21st 2007 and brought together 350 participants from about 45 countries. It was an extraordinary opportunity to share information and to build up cooperation for DNA barcoding. CeDAMar was represented by Dr. Saskia Brix, German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research Wilhelmshaven. She presented the project “Barcoding CeDAMar Isopoda”.

Further conference information is posted at www.dnabarcodes2007.org

For new barcoders a short course on DNA barcoding was held, which introduced the methods used by the big labs in Guelph (CCDB, Guelph. Paul Hebert) and Washington (L.A.B., Smithsonian Institution, Lee Weight). Lee Weight presented the possibilities of an efficient DNA barcoding workflow by technology transfer initiated by the big labs. An introduction into BoLD, the barcoding workbench was presented by Sujeevan Ratnasingham (Guelph). Standard protocols for fixing marine invertebrates for genetic analyses were presented in talks dealing with recent field work (Moorea biocode project: Chris Meyer), which were discussed during the Marine Barcoding workshop led by Dirk Steinke on the last conference day.

MarBOL (Marine Barcode of Life) was discussed as opportunity for CoML projects to work with their barcode data. The marine barcoding discussion focused on the following questions:

• How can barcode collecting and processing be implemented in current marine research?
• What are the needs for marine projects to progress with barcoding?  

Tools and experiences in the Moorea biocode project were presented by Chris Meyer, University of California, Berkeley. Jesse Ausubel presented the connection between CoML and the Barcode of Life Initiative (BOLI). Populating the marine barcode database was one of the tasks on which the idea of MarBOL is founded. It was discussed how a barcode infrastructure for the marine projects could be investigated.

CeDAMar will contribute to this infrastructure by organizing a workshop on deep-sea barcoding, which will be held in Wilhelmshaven (Germany) in May 2008.