Student Helena’s key role in DNA barcoding Welsh plants

Wales has become the first nation in the world to DNA barcode all its native flowering plants and conifers.

Taking part in this pioneering project was an undergraduate from the University of Manchester, northern England, whose contribution was so significant that her work has been published in an international journal.

Biology student Helena Davies was on placement at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where the ground-breaking project, Barcode Wales, has been taking place.

She quickly became actively involved in the data analysis, the results of which were recently published in the journal PLoS ONE. “I came into the project a month or so after I started my placement at the National Botanic Garden of Wales and helped to analyse some of the data included in the paper,” she said.

In fact, so impressed were staff at the botanical gardens with her work that she was given the job of working on the expansion of the plant DNA barcoding project across the UK. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the genetic hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms.

Helena has been working on Barcode UK helping to organise the collection of plants, processing some of the first DNA sequences in the laboratory and developing management systems to record every plant sample used.

She said: “It was absolutely fantastic to be so involved in a project with such potential on my year in industry. Being an undergraduate I didn’t think I would be able to contribute to such high impact research, so I feel incredibly lucky to have gained this experience.”

Helena is a named author in a published paper on Barcode Wales, a rare achievement for an undergraduate student - “When I found out that I would be one of the named authors on the paper I was thrilled.

“Seeing my name and looking at some of the figures that I had directly worked on published within the paper was fantastic. I just feel extremely fortunate and very grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Barcode Wales.”

All the DNA barcodes assembled by the project are now freely available on the Barcode of Life Database to allow them to be used by researchers throughout the world.

It is hoped the barcodes will assist in the battle against numerous diseases. For example, one of the projects between the garden and the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences at Cardiff University, Wales will DNA-barcode honey for drug discovery.

It is also hoped DNA barcoding may be able to help scientists combat the crisis facing pollinators such as bees and hoverflies that have been dying out at an alarming rate.

Barcode Wales has been led by Dr Natasha de Vere of the National Botanic Garden of Wales with project partners from the National Museum Wales, the University of the West of England, Aberystwyth University, Glamorgan University and the Botanical Society of the British Isles, with high performance computing support from HPC Wales.

Dr de Vere explained the importance of the technique saying: “Wales is now in the unique position of being able to identify plant species from materials which in the past would have been incredibly difficult or impossible. The value of the Barcode Wales project is that we have created a powerful platform for a broad range of research from biodiversity conservation to human health.”

The team’s work on Barcode UK will continue as Helena Davies returns to Manchester to complete her final year, hoping to carry out a doctorate in plant-based research after she graduates.

She says her time at the National Botanic Garden of Wales has changed her life. “Before I did my placement here I had no idea what I wanted to do, although I knew I wanted to stay in science. But I had never even considered plants. This placement has really given me a strong direction and determination to continue in scientific research.”

How bar-coding works: the scientific community agreed on the sections of two genes called rbcL and matK to act as the DNA barcodes for plants. These genes can be used to catalogue plant life because they have a slightly different code between species but are very similar within a species.

Barcode Wales has created a reference database of almost 6,000 DNA barcodes based on the country’s 1,143 native flowering plants and conifers, the most complete coverage of plant DNA barcodes for any nation in the world.