The Plant DNA Barcoding Project

To Read more on the team visit "The Team" in the side bar or click here.

The 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 an ambitious well experience team mostly consisting of researcher and postgraduate students from UJ. 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. The plant collecting team will consist of Olivier, Michelle & Masha. Solome will be in charge of the back-up team at Klipbokkop (Mark, Ledile, Bruce and Jephris). They will have the important job of sorting samples, preparing herbarium specimens and putting leaves into silica as samples come back
from the field.