Alex Laini 27-09-2025

A great day in Turin, talking about barcoding and metabarcoding to people at the Researcher's Night 2025. A fantastic experience: we interacted with a lot of pepole - kids and adults, experts and non-experts. Two posters described the principles of barcoding, from tissue to taxonomic assignment, and the aims of the META2 project.  A microscope with some dung beetles to observe was irresistible. But the main attraction was... a game with a real barcode scanner to scan DNA sequences! Once scanned, users were asked to compare a query sequence of a dung beetle with two reference sequences and choose the right one. Sometimes the results were really unexpected!