Belgian species identification service for organisms and tissues of policy concern

Bopco - Barcoding Facility for Organisms and Tissues of Policy Concern - acts as a focal point for identifying biological materials upon request, by providing access to the expertise and infrastructure necessary to identify organisms of policy concern and their derived products. BopCo’s identification service is available to all stakeholders who deal with such material and who need accurate species identifications. These can rely on (i) traditional morphology-based approaches employing the taxonomic expertise and specimen collections at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) and/or (ii) on DNA-based techniques like DNA-barcoding, qPCR, RFLP, eDNA, microsatellites or third generation sequencing technologies for which BopCo has access to fully equipped laboratories at both RBINS and RMCA. A prerequisite to using DNA-based techniques, however, is the availability of comprehensive and reliable reference barcode libraries. Therefore, BopCo also contributes to improving DNA-barcode databases of taxa of policy concern by producing new DNA-barcodes, which are made publicly available, and evaluates existing DNA-barcodes for their utility. Examples displaying the taxonomic diversity, stakeholder range, policy concern issues and utilised techniques are presented.