HALIFAX — It sounds like a futuristic fantasy, but scientists are quietly creating a global databank of DNA bar codes for the world’s flora and fauna that could be used to identify illicit goods at borders and track the spread of disease.
From tiny micro-organisms to wild African buffalo, the Canadian-led science initiative is quickly amassing bar codes or identifiers for a growing database of life forms that will soon go after all plant life.
Zoologist Paul Hebert pioneered the unique technology that is being explored by a growing number of agencies to detect smuggled goods, falsely labelled products and harmful bacteria.
“It’s the way the planet will be surveilled in the future,” Hebert said Friday from the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario in Guelph before heading to Mexico for a conference on the expanding field of science.
“There’s just no question that moving to this technology allows us to scale biodiversity analyses in a way that absolutely hasn’t been possible.”
The project, which took root in 2003 at Hebert’s lab, will add plant life to the growing catalogue when scientists seal an agreement in Mexico on how to identify DNA bar codes in flora.
That’s expected to open the way for the identification of illegally harvested forest products, endangered plant species and improved regulation of herbal medicines, researchers say.
The Consortium for the Bar Code of Life project involves identifying a particular DNA sequence in marine and animal life that is unique to the species. That allows scientists to accurately identify the species and create a so-called bar code of its DNA similar to the black and white stripes on store goods.
So far, researchers have added 100,000 species — including 725,000 individual specimens — in the databank, with Canada contributing about 80 per cent of that.
The technology has already been used to identify falsely labelled fish in the United States and clamp down on restaurants that sell one fish species as something else.
David Schindel, executive secretary of the consortium, said several government agencies in the U.S. and Canada are looking closely at the innovation for food safety, conservation, disease control and consumer protection efforts.
The  U.S. Food and Drug Administration has adopted it for fish identification and also used DNA bar-coding to distinguish the seed pods of star anise from another identical herb that contains neurotoxins.
The U.S. Agriculture Department is also working on a global database of DNA bar codes for fruit flies to deal with horticultural pests, and lumber products to identify endangered timber products.
“Inside the U.S. government, there’s more than a half dozen agencies that are actively testing bar-coding,” Schindel said from Mexico, where 350 scientists from 50 countries are meeting this week.
“So lots of government interest and investment and that’s going to accelerate the rate at which we are building the database.”
In Canada, only a few government departments have shown an interest in DNA bar-coding, Hebert said, adding he is working with Environment Canada to use the technology on water quality issues.
Bar-coding could also reveal how climate change is affecting animals and plants by determining what they eat now versus what they consumed centuries ago.
Hebert said they can do this by examining the contents of an insect’s stomach and animal remains taken from ice cores found in ancient permafrost.
The findings might seem so esoteric as to be meaningless, but Schindel said they can give valuable insight into how entire food webs and ecosystems are changing due to global warming and other human pressures.
“We can use bar-coding to reconstruct whole communities and their food-web relationships,” he said. “That tells us what life was like in the past and it’s going to allow us to document what impact global climate change has had...
“That’s the cutting edge of how scientifically bar-coding can be used.”
Hebert said he can soon see a time when people will be able to use a tabletop devices at border crossings, schools and government departments to quickly identify a plant or animal.