Database to save DNA of world's endangered animals

Client

The Frozen Ark Project is based in the Biology building at the University of Nottingham. The mission of the project is to collect, preserve and store tissue, gametes, viable cells and DNA from endangered animals. Their project focuses on the thousands of animals that are threatened with extinction and is the animal equivalent of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank.

The challenge

The Frozen Ark Consortium, which has 16 members in 9 countries with more joining, needed to make a very complicated international database, so that their members could enter the details of their frozen collections. The database would then search other databases, signal matches and record the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) status of each species. The creation of the database was centrally important to the success of the project.

Our help

Mike Diplock, an iT4Communities volunteer with over 30 years of experience, offered to work on what Professor Bryan Clarke FRS, co-founder of the project, described as a formidable task. Mike spent over 250 hours working on the project between July 2010 and January 2011 and he is now in the process of finishing the installation. Mike lives in the East of England so most of the communication was done by email.

The results

• An important international searchable database.

What our client said

We had to be very choosy about the quality of our volunteer. Mike Diplock has been quite outstanding. He is very patient, very helpful and very clever. The database is now being installed on the University of Nottingham server and it is a tour de force. Mike also gave a beautifully clear and logical talk to our Advisory Group at London Zoo, explaining the structure of the database. If iT4C has other volunteers as effective as he is, you will do great things for communities in the UK. We hope he will continue to be interested in the Charity's progress.

Professor Bryan Clarke FRS, Co-founder, The Frozen Ark Project

28th February 2011