Illustration by David Goldin

Worldwide sales of exotic animal products add up to $15 billion annually, a global trade that is fueled in part by the illegal trafficking of endangered species from Africa, Asia, and South America. Law enforcement officials are severely hampered by their inability to distinguish bits of cured meat or chemically treated animal skins by visual inspection. Now a research team led by Mitchell Eaton of the U.S. Geological Survey has developed a way to differentiate animal products based on slight variations in a single gene. This bodes well for future technologies that may enable on-the-spot testing to pick out, for example, a piece of bushmeat that was cut from an endangered primate as opposed to a common beefsteak.

Eaton searched markets in Africa and South America, collecting skin and blood samples from animal carcasses that he was able to visually identify by species. Back in the lab, his team compiled a database that matches commonly hunted animals -- including primates, crocodiles, and bovids -- with each species' unique genetic signature. Now mystery samples can be sent to any DNA forensics lab to be compared with Eaton's database.