On-screen text: The Centre for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada leads the development of DNA barcoding for specimen identification and species discovery. 
Paul Hebert: “MPG as well. Montana is featuring heavily. And here? Israel.”
On-screen text: The Collections Unit sources, digitizes, and archives specimens from all over the world. 
Paul Hebert: “And these specimens? Costa Rica. We’re working the Arctic.”
“We get a lot of other specimens that come in from museums. The primary goal of this work is to try to develop a DNA barcode reference library coverage for every genus of lepidopteran on the planet, so we’re analyzing quite a few old specimens here.”
“We do about 70,000 species per year.”
“These are the plates that are prepared for DNA extraction. They’ll go next onto the root and we’ll see their DNA extracted.”
“Now we’re going to jump next door and see where the specimens are stored.”
“So this is our archive of dry material”
On-screen text: There are approximately 4.5 million terrestrial and aquatic specimens in the collection. 
“And we’re now going to jump down to the lower floor where you’ll see the DNA archive where we store all the DNA extracts from these specimens and where you can see the computer hardware that supports the barcode of life data system. So let’s jump down there.”
On-screen text: There are approximately two million DNA extracts stored in the DNA archive. 
“Can I get into any of them? That’s the question.”
“Alright. We finally broke into one. The rest are locked up under secure storage. These are all -80 freezers and if I hazard to grab them. We have about two million DNA extracts in this room so each one tracks back to one of those specimens that’s got a DNA barcode record associated with it and these extracts we can access for if we want to carry out extra analysis or if, where permits allow that to happen or in the case of Canadian material, when can do what we like and it’s available for multi-gene analysis, so I’m leaving the building and heading into our other building.”
On-screen text: The Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding provides DNA barcode-based species identification services.
On-screen text: The centre currently processes two million specimens per year. 
“We’re now looking at one of our 3730 Excel sequencers. They’re beautiful. These were really the machines that really were the beginning of our coding and still are highly useful as gold standard machines.”
“These are all ninety-six, I think TCR Farms and we use this for cleanup of the sequencing reactions for analysis, and these are 384 PCR machines that see a lot of heavy use now as we’ve cranked up the number of specimens and as we’ve consolidated material into 384-will format. So DNA extraction is 96 will but after that everything is 384 will.”
“So we’ve had this for about two and a half years, it’s a sequel one. It was the second of these instruments positioned in Canada and it’s proven to be just a marvellous instrument. So this little chip has a million pits in it or holes and it generates about 300,000 reads per run and it makes it possible for us to analyze nearly 10,000 specimens in each eight-hour run.”
“You can see some tape on the floor and that is because we’re going to be getting the big brother of sequel one in just two weeks. It’ll be the first one installed in Canada and it would make it possible in a single run to analyze 80,000 specimens in a single 8-hour run. So this is transforming what we can do with DNA barcode library construction.”
“So this is our other high-throughput sequencing facility and these are basically a couple of the ion family machines, the s5 and the personal genome machine. And these are short-reed platforms, as opposed to really long-reed platforms of the sequel.”
“This is our server room.”
On-screen text: Data collected at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics is added to the Barcode of Life Database, or BOLD. Bold and mBRAVE databases are supported by 1,500 servers containing approximately 600 terabytes of data. 
On-screen text: BOLD continually expands its computational capacity to accommodate the massive data streams generated by new DNA sequencing technologies. 
“So we’re definitely going to be adding quite a lot more computational hardware. So this is BOLD, the biggest biodiversity brain on the planet.”
On-screen text: The Centre for Biodiversity Genomics is also home to the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) Consortium Secretariat. 
In 2019, iBOL launched its second major research program, BIOSCAN. For more information, visit ibol.org