Our Discovery Mission

DNA sequencing will clearly play an important role in this mission - indeed, the mission would be impossible without it. Currently, some taxonomists have access to sequencing facilities while others do not, and some are skilled in all aspects of sequencing, bioinformatics and phylogenetics while others are not. This roundtable will consider issues around sequencing, including:

• How can we ensure that sequencing speeds up, rather than slows down, species discovery and delimitation?

• Should sequencing and bioinformatics support be more centralised or more dispersed than at present? 

• Should all taxonomists be trained in every step along the sequencing->bioinfoirmatics->phylogeny->species delimitation pipeline, or should we specialise more?

• How do we best balance the roles of short, cheap, universal sequences (barcodes) versus longer, more expensive but more informative sequences (up to and including complete genomes)?