Today the University of Guelph's Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG) is the hub of a worldwide research collaboration to catalogue all life on the planet.
This ambitious project's origins lie in a discovery by scientists in the University's former zoology department that a short stretch of genetic material could be used to distinguish species of animals.
Twenty years ago this month, the team announced their discovery in a research paper that introduced the term "DNA barcoding" to describe a potential identification system for all the globe's organisms.
