The DNA detectives are changing the game for insect research in Pakistan

Look closely enough and there is an entire world moving beneath our feet, over our crops, and through our forests, much of it smaller than a fingernail, and much of it still unknown.

Pakistan’s insects occupy almost every ecological niche imaginable, whether it’s the grasshoppers of the country’s arid plains or the butterflies and moths of its forests, the aphids feeding on its crops, the beetles breaking down dead matter or the mosquitoes that can carry disease.

Traditionally, studying an insect meant placing it under a microscope, examining its physical characteristics and comparing it with existing descriptions. Today, that process is being augmented by DNA barcodes, genomic databases, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The question has evolved from What insect is this? to What can its genes, images and data tell us that our eyes cannot?

Two species can look alike or a damaged or immature specimen may not have the necessary characteristics to help identify it. When physical traits reach their diagnostic limit, bioinformatics steps in to read the unalterable ledger coded inside the cells—the insect’s DNA.

Pakistan has already demonstrated what can be achieved at a national level through this method. A DNA-barcode survey of insect biodiversity examined material collected from 1,858 sites between 2010 and 2019. It eventually generated 50,592 barcode records, 49,363 of which were assigned to 6,590 Barcode Index Numbers (BINs).

Simply put, a BIN is a reference code used in the global Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) database. When researchers analyse a short piece of an insect’s DNA, BOLD compares it with existing records and clusters similar specimens into the same group under a specific BIN code. This makes it possible to group insects that likely belong to the same species, even when their formal scientific name is unknown. This is how the BIN serves as a practical working proxy name for a species.

The study produced Pakistan’s first comprehensive DNA barcode profile of its insects, and the first survey of its kind in........

© Dawn Prism