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Interesting article

https://www.sweethomenews.com/story/202 ... cleId=8524

It says that have a machine that "using just a sliver of wood, scientists can identify the genus and species in seconds."

The article is undated, but there is a 2019 date at the bottom of the page - is this old news?

Ed

I had not specifically heard about this used for wood, but I have seen documentaries where wild animal hairs or excrement are used to identify species, via DNA comparison to a library of DNA tests. So, wood is probably not new.

That's interesting.

Without being too pedantic...the article says they are using mass spectroscopy for the analysis, not DNA.

Mass spec can give you a picture of the molecules in a sample with their relative proportions. I imagine the spectrum for a piece of wood is pretty complicated so they probably focus on the main ingredients. They must then have a library of results from known samples to compare to. A pretty substantial piece of work.
I wonder if they can really distinguish between say the various rosewoods?

Dave

Seems like it would vary too much based on soil minerals.

This is pretty cool. The method, direct analysis in real time-time of flight mass spectrometry (DART-TOFMS), has been around since at least as far back as 2005. Research to apply it to wood identification has been around since at least 2012.

What's really slick is that mass spectra can be rapidly determined directly from a small wood sample without a bunch of pre-processing steps. Standard mass spec methods that have been used for a long time have required a lot of sample preparation before the mass spec analysis could even be done. This method would also be faster and simpler than DNA-based identification.

Here's a paper that came out in 2015 in which the method was used to distinguish Central and South American rosewood species (including Brazilian) from each other and from several non-rosewood look-alike species: https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2015/fpl_2015_espinoza001.pdf

It also appears that the method can be used to distinguish geographical sources, even to the level of distinguishing Doug fir trees that grew in the Coast Range in Oregon from Doug firs that grew in the Cascades in Oregon.

Here's a photo from another article showing how small of a wood sample is needed for testing. The stream of heated helium ions comes from the right, passes over the wood sample, and goes into the inlet (cone shape on left) of the DART-TOFMS instrument.

_________________
Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Jay thanks for that link, it really is an impressive technique.

I wonder if anyone has applied it to the softwood species that we use. It is pretty well impossible, at least for an amateur, to distinguish between the various spruces by appearance. We have to rely on our suppliers and I don't suppose they always get it right.

Dave