Countering illegal wildlife trade needs rapid, reliable species ID in places such as airports. This study describes VeRIF-ID, a portable nanopore DNA method that identifies vertebrate species on-site with >91 % accuracy, offering a fast, low-cost tool against trafficking.

Rapid on-site universal vertebrate species identification via multi-barcode nanopore sequencing
The growing illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens biodiversity and is a conduit for zoonotic disease, yet its risk of detection is low. Once processed, trafficked species are difficult to identify…