DNA goggles
Nhu Nguyen (Thu, 31 Jan 2013 23:26:39 PST)

Like I said Tim, the power of DNA detection all comes from the work that
was done before. Without that work, you're just giving me a piece of alien
skin. What I said is within the realm of what we can achieve. That is all I
will say about this topic. It is probably boring and pedantic to the rest
of the group.

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:15 PM, Tim Harvey <zigur@hotmail.com> wrote:

You'd better let Kew know. Their sequencing labs are unable to identify
unknowns at the generic level - and that was a lab specialising in a
particular family!

T

Yep. Based on current technology (and all the resources at my disposal),

I

can tell you how many individual plants there are, how many populations,
how many genera, families, order...etc. I can even tell if a plant is a
hybrid, what diseases it has, what and how many taxa of microbes live on

or

within it, what beneficial fungi it is associated with. I can tell you

what

it's chromosome counts are, how many functional genes it has, how the
chromosomes rearranged themselves over time, how the genes rearranged
themselves over time. Then I can infer each plant's evolutionary path and
make an educated guess as to how old the species is and more and more.

And

all of this is only possible because of the many years of work botanists,
ecologists, microbiologists, and evolutionary biologists have spent
gathering knowledge. We compare what we know today to what was known
yesterday.

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