After spending two weeks in Britain, I intended to blog about the genomics issues I read and heard about in the British Press. Then I get home and the first thing I see on my homepage when I start up my computer is a link to a newspaper article on analysing Bigfoot DNA. Wow! I thought nothing I saw in Britain could compare to this.

Turns out that the DNA indicated the Bigfoot to be 96% Possum and the remainder human. I guess they didn’t even need to do the DNA test, there was a Bigfoot body. Examination of the body proved it to be a rubber gorilla suit.

I did wonder though, how would we know if indeed we had Bigfoot DNA.

I’m thinking that it all comes down to the “species concept”. What is a species and how do we determine it. In a recent letter to the Calgary Herald the writer claimed that wolves and dogs are the same species. He backed up his claim saying that dogs and wolves interbreed. The biological definition of species is considerably more complex than that. I would go so far as to say that the definition of a species is what scientists call an operational definition. An operational definition allows the definer to set up unmistakable set up a set of qualities that can be independently determined by someone else.

Perhaps the best example of an operational definition is found in Neil Campbell’s “Biology”, a text used in many first year Biology courses. He specifically states: “All plants, as defined in this text, are multicellular eukaryotes that are photosynthetic autotrophs.” “Plants as we are defining them are nearly all terrestrial organisms, although some plants have returned secondarily to water during their evolution.” In this statement, Campbell clearly states what he means when he is talking about plants regardless of how others may define them.

Back to the Bigfoot DNA then. There are many operational definitions used to determine a species. Like a wiki, the operational definition of a species continues to have characteristics added to it. Originally if organisms looked similar they were placed into the same species. Then it was decided that they must be able to interbreed. Ah yes, but then was added that they must be able to reproduce fertile offspring. And after that, produce fertile offspring in the wild. Oh so complex. By now, we have at least twelve very specific ways of defining a species, and I’m not even going to discuss the lumpers and the splitters. One of the methods involves a Genetic definition which requires DNA hybridization studies, DNA fingerprinting and now even DNA bar coding. Thus, if Bigfoot had not been mostly possum and rubber suit, then we might have had the discovery of a new species.

Well, a new operation definition must now be added to the study of Genomics. It is a brilliant one. For a long time the talk was all about the Mountain Pine Beetle Project. Well, working with the Mountain Pine Beetle also meant working with the Pines. And it also meant working with the bluestain fungus. Three genomes interacting. After tossing around a few ideas, the team came up with the latin word for three – Tria to describe the project. Read more about the Tria project on the Genome Alberta website.