APES- Bushmeat DNA Blast Assignment Name: Darius Heard Backstory: Imagine you are working with conservationists

in Cameroon. You want to help them identify potential poachers and help them to enforce local poaching laws. You Need to identify which vendors are selling the poached meat but it is in pieces and hard to identify the species by sight- what do you do? Instructions: 1: Using the DNA Blast Program- http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi type in the DNA sequence into the nucleotide blast. Choose the Nucleotide blast. Under Database, make sure to choose other. 2: Using the results from the blast, type the organism name into google to find out what organism you have. (Common Name) Sample #A62498: Sitatunga

Sample #B77342:

African Porcupine

Sample #C79942:

Olive Baboon

Sample #C80217:

African Bush Elephant

Sample #C90034:

Drill

Sample #D51210:

Western Mountain Gorilla

Sample #G34176:

Pruesss Monkey

Sample #G54358:

Greater Cane Cat

Sample #H64991:

Western red Colobus

Sample #I38722:

Perters Duiker

Sample #K28831:

Jentinks Duiker

Sample #N51683:

Mountain Bongo

Conclusion: Why is it important to know the genome of an organism? How does it help us to identify endangered and threatened species?

It is important to know the genomes of a species, because when you are given meat that looks alive you won't know the difference and can't tell what the species is. Taking DNA from the meat and knowing the genome, you can tell what species it is. This helps us identify endangered or threatened species because if we have the genome we can compare the genome to the meat and see if the species is being hunted in that area, therefore we can stop the exploitation of this species.