APES
Alec Humphries
Bush Meat DNA
Imagine you are working with conservationists in Cameroon. You want to help
them identify potential poachers and help them to enforce local poaching laws.
You need to identify which vendors are selling the poached meat but it is in
pieces and hard to identify the species by sight- what do you do?
Bushmeat- The meat of african wild animals used for consumption.
Instructions:
1: Using the DNA Blast Program- http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi type in
the DNA sequence into the nucleotide blast. Choose the “Nucleotide blast”.
Under Database, make sure to choose “other”.
2: Using the results from the blast, type the organism name into google to find
out what organism you have. (Common Name)
Sample #A62498: Marshbuck (1)
Sample #B77342: African Porcupine (2)
Sample #C79942: Olive Baboon (3)
Sample #C80217: African Bush Elephant (4)
Sample #C90034: Drill (5)
Sample #D51210: Western Gorilla (6)
Sample #G34176: Preuss's Monkey (7)
Sample #G54358: Greater Cane Rat (8)
Sample #H64991: Red Colobus (9)
Sample #I38722: Peters's Duiker (10)
Sample #K28831: Jentink's Duiker (11)
Sample #N51683: Greater Kudu (12)
Conclusion: Why is it important to know the genome of an organism? How does
it help us to identify endangered and threatened species?
It is important to know the genome of an organism because it can allow the
public to know whether or not the food they're eating is actually what it is sold as, or if
it is an endangered species. This helps recognize threatened or endangered species by
comparing a sample of the DNA in the meat to a known endangered or threatened
species and determining whether or not the meat's DNA sequence is the same as an
endangered or threatened species.