Frequently Asked Questions
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Video Tutorial
1. Registering an Account

An introduction to the BOLD Student Data Portal website. This video provides an overview of the system and describes how to register and create a course.
2. Submitting Data

This video follows the submission of a DNA barcode record from the specimen data all the way to the sequence. It focuses on the student interface, but it allows instructors to follow the steps students will need to undertake in order to create their records.
3. Overseeing a course

This video provides an overview of the tools available to instructors to monitor student work and participation. It also describes the steps needed in validating and approving student-generated data for publication on BOLD and GenBank.

Why is it important to add as much biological information about my specimen as possible?

Say you collect a handful of mussels from the beach. You may be fairly confident they are all the same species, they all look the same and there are thousands of them lying around.

However when you barcode your mussels, you find out that instead of one species, you actually have two! And one of them is a new species that no one has discovered before!

You can bet lots of scientists will be very interested in your discovery. They will want to go back to that same beach to collect more samples to study.

As you can imagine, if you did not include your exact collection location on your BOLD-SDP record, no one else will know where to go and your discovery of a new species will likely go unnoticed.

If, on the other hand, you included all the information you can into your record, allowing other scientists to go back to your exact collection site, they will be able to investigate your findings further. Who knows, you might even end up with a new species named after you!

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