MSU faculty member devises automated system to aid museums in collecting genetic data
Contact: Sarah Nicholas听听听听听听听听
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擜 first-of-its-kind approach to unlocking biological collections for large-scale research that will complement museum efforts around the world to digitize collections is being developed by a 花秀直播 State faculty member.
Ryan A. Folk, an assistant professor of biological sciences and herbarium curator at MSU, is using a $432,781 three-year National Science Foundation grant to automate the data collection process by using a combination of unique object identifiers, QR codes and citizen scientists, or non-biologists recruited to help with data acquisition.
鈥淥ur goal is to create a resource for the scientific community,鈥 said Folk, who is collaborating with researchers from the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Iowa State University. MSU Department of Biological Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow Carolina Siniscalchi also is involved in the project.
The new method uses a unique object identifier鈥攈idden in a QR code鈥攚hich is assigned and physically attached to each herbarium voucher, and the specimen is photographed with the identifier clearly visible. With more than 250,000 species in the plant kingdom alone, Folk said the acquisition and documentation of specimen material is 鈥渢ime-consuming and error-prone.鈥
Folk served as lead author on a paper about the process featured in a spring edition of Applications in Plant Sciences, a flagship publication in phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships among biological entities. APPS is a monthly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on new tools, technologies and protocols in all plant science areas and is available as part of the聽Wiley Online Library. The article is online at .
鈥淯sing a system of QR codes, we published a system managing thousands of samples from herbarium to sequencing and data analysis. As the paper documents, we covered 15,000 species with genomic data in roughly two years,鈥 Folk said.聽鈥淚n the future, we hope that all such collection information will be available online, where it鈥檚 easy to find and the work won鈥檛 need to be repeated.鈥
鈥淥ur workflow is made up of essentially several strategies that takes you straight from walking into a museum all the way through data analysis and publication,鈥 said Folk. 鈥淢y hope is that our efforts will jump-start major projects focused on other organisms, as well as establish a new baseline for biodiversity in the nitrogen-fixing clade of seed plants.鈥
A native of Akron, Ohio, Folk鈥檚 lab at MSU uses聽genomic and bioinformatic techniques to document the origins of plant diversity from evolutionary and ecological perspectives using a variety of plant groups and habitats. His work is based in MSU鈥檚 herbarium, housing approximately 35,000 vascular plant specimens from around the world with an emphasis on the Southeastern U.S.
Part of MSU鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences, information about the Department of Biological Sciences is available at .
MSU is 花秀直播鈥檚 leading university, also available online at聽.