Oct 27 2008
A meeting for cooperative planning between China and Canada on International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) was held on 14 October in Beijing.
Chaired by Prof. ZHANG Zhibin, director-general of the CAS Bureau of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, the meeting was attended by a six-member Canadian delegation and Chinese scholars from CAS and other institutions. CAS Vice President LI Jiayang was also present at the opening and delivered a speech.
The iBOL, a consortium of more than 1,000 scientists from 25 countries, has one overarching goal - to assemble the sequence library and the technology necessary to identify organisms rapidly and inexpensively.
This Sino-Canadian meeting is hailed as an important step after a series of rewarding cooperative moves over the past years: During his visit to China in November 2007, iBOL Chief Scientist Paul Hebert met with leaders of CAS, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and Natural Science Foundation of China, and held talks on development and cooperation in the field of DNA bar-coding; in April 2008, an agreement was stricken between CAS and iBOL, asserting that CAS, on behalf of China, will be one of the four central nodes of the US$100 million and five-year worldwide consortium to assemble the DNA Barcode library of life. Five months later, CAS and MOST launched a pre-research project on iBOL and a study on the system construction of DNA bar-coding of important organisms, respectively. The experts say that the ambitious plan will have major scientific significance and forereaching social and economic impacts.