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I've posted this because of this passage:

"Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes."

Now, I've heard about people that wanted to develop handheld DNA readers, but to my knowledge they don't exist, yet the article mentions them off-hand as if they are commonplace technology.

Is that true ?

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They are not yet commonplace, they are still being developed. See this 2005 National Geographic article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0126_050126_...

I can't seem to find too much details on how it might work other than the fact that it looks at a specific region of DNA that is common between a lot of eukaryotic species.

They are not yet commonplace ? That's something else than they don't exist, where can I buy one ?

The article you cite is about the start of a project to index species, not about developing a hand-held reader.

If such a hand-held reader exists then that would be very big news indeed.

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