Thanks to my friend, John Keogh of GS/1 Canada, for this link to the "Barcode of Life Data Systems":

http://www.barcodinglife.org/views/login.php

The Barcode of Life Data Systems (using the acronym BOLD instead of BLDS...) product, like John also a resident of Ontario, is an "online workbench that aids collection, management, analysis and use of DNA barcodes".

This is an interesting connection between the real and electronic worlds--species-specific [this adjective brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department] sequences of DNA simultaneously enabling ease of sequencing and the elimination of false positives (that is, eliminating confusion with another species). Solving the bioinformatics involved in this are worthy of a Fields Medal.

Interestingly from a security perspective is how this translates into the trade off between specificity and ease of reading in any printed (or non-printed, for that matter) deterrent. Error code correction (ECC) is used with barcodes to prevent barcode "collision". RFID uses sequential "sleeping" of the current most active chip to prevent collisions. In each, they still occur.  It will be interesting to see what the BOLD team discovers about this trade-off between ease of reading and "collision prevention".

More importantly to security, perhaps, are the implications of the BOLD research with regard to the "Internet of Things". As every item possible--each spoonful of food, each pharmaceutical tablet, each sheet of paper, etc.--can be "tagged" for the plant, animal and fungi species it contains, product tracing will do the equivalent of the IPv4 to IPv6 transformation. In other words, a surfeit of object "IP addresses" will suddenly be available.

Worried, privacy fans? Don't be. Remember, even if the amount of data is doubling every five months (according to some sources, anyway--the Blogosphere is also estimated to double in size every 5-6 months), the amount of "information" is not. A lot more data is created, but our understanding of it isn't. If your spoonful of oatmeal shows a few more DNA from wheat type A than wheat type B, and mine the converse, are they really from different bushels? Probably not--it all comes down to margin of error (not to mention cost of analysis). But, it may make it more difficult to claim higher quality wheat in a product.

-Steve