Development of DNA Barcodes for Identification of Toxic Cyanobacteria

This presentation details our continuing work to develop DNA barcodes for identifying cyanobacteria at a species level. Toxic cyanobacteria species create harmful algal blooms that pollute water sources making them unsafe for humans and wild life. Current regulation methods call for morphological identification which is expensive and inaccurate. As a solution, our team proposes DNA barcodes will be better for identification and therefore regulatory purposes. DNA barcodes are small sequences of DNA that are unique and standardized. The goal is to produce barcodes for each of the four types of cyanobacterial species and publish them to GenBank.