The Fish-Bol project

Andrea Shaw, a teacher at Wellington College, spent a year at NIWA helping collect and analyse shark DNA as part of a major international research project.

Transcript

Mrs Andrea Shaw (New Zealand Science, Mathematics & Technology Teacher Fellow, 2006)

We wanted to try and collect the CO1 gene, which is mitochondrial DNA that’s in all animals. We’re looking at sharks.

The reason we’re doing this research, is there’s a project called Fish-Bol, where all the fish species from all over the planet are going to be put onto the database. We’re all doing the same processes, so it’s standardised and it’s very scientific.

Once we’ve got that information, it’ll be accessible for people to be able to compare the DNA of this particular gene with fish all over the world, and see how related they are.