Let's say we found some unknown animal out in the wild. We are curious as to what kind of animal it is, so we take a sample of it's DNA and run it against various other creatues of similarity.

 

For instance, The Tree is trying to figure out a certain type of frog. Would it be possible to take a DNA sample and test it against other frog species to figure out what kind of frog it is?

To me, the answer seems to be "obviously." Is there a particular difficulty that you imagine might arise?

Cost, production, availability of database to users, cost of supplies...

 

Is such a system already available to the public?

Phylogeneticists are using DNA, along with other morphological and sometime behavioral traits, to build phylogenetic trees.

Cost, production, availability of database to users, cost of supplies...

 

Is such a system already available to the public?

 

Oh, sorry, I thought you were asking if it could be done, period, not whether the average joe could go have it done somewhere.

These things a slightly expensive, but there are becoming more and more commonplace in places like high school biology labs, where only a ten years ago, you could only find them in universities.

 

Of course, the big factor now would be time. Does Joe Somebody have the time to sequence a genome?

What devices? What program? What system? Hmm?

 

Could someone start using terminology instead of indefinite language?

Actually for simple taxonomy one usually do not use the whole genome. In fact this is atm still a bit limited for most eukaryotes and even not that common for prokarytes.

For taxonomic purposes it usally only takes a good marker that is very conseverd. Depending on application one often uses ribosomal genes or markers on mitochondria etc.

One possibility is thus to isolate your DNA, amplify conserved regions of the marker with pcr and sequence the products.

The chemicals are expensive but affordable, the most expensive stuff is the thermo-cycler (usually ~5k$ and up) for the PCR. Databases are available as well as free software for tree building. You usually need somewhat related sequences, though.