Like their human counterparts, 78 pandas in the wild of Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces recently got their identity cards, Xinhua news agency reported.

The card contains two codes, one a numeric code representing the country, province, protection zone and family the panda belongs to, and the other a genetic bar code revealing its sex and personal features.

After more than 10 years of sustained effort, a team of local scientists, for the first time in the world, took the lead to work out a genetic identity card for wild pandas. The research was completed at the laboratory of conservation genetics and reproduction biology for endangered wildlife under the Ministry of Education.

It suggests that the account management of pandas has stepped into the genetic era, said Fang Shenghuo, a professor with the Life Sciences Institute of Zhejiang University, who heads the team.

Only one in 1.6 billion pandas are likely to share the same genetic code, Fang said.

Academic inability has hindered wild life research around the globe from obtaining whole genetic DNA, because to hurt the endangered species to get samples is out of the question.

On the other hand, excrement and hair, the only traces left by animals in the wild, possess just scraps of genes.

However, the development of DNA fingerprinting and new extraction methods helped the research group extract all the genomic DNA from the pandas' excrement.

Back in 1998, a joint research group with scientists from Zhejiang University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chengdu University, swept through some 900 square kilometers of area in two protection zones - Foping in Shaanxi Province and Tangjiahe in Sichuan Province - to get excrement and hair samples from pandas.

From the samples, the scientists extracted all of the genetic DNA and further, through a gene probe, obtained their gene fingerprint patterns.

Zhang Anju, a famed panda expert, said that the method has opened a new approach for studying the diversity of pandas, and therefore it is important not only for panda preservation, but also for the protection of their ecology.

(Eastday.com 03/01/2001)