Picture this: at the border, biosecurity agents find a bag of water with goldfish in somebody's luggage.
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Currently, border officials have to judge whether any of the fish look sick, and therefore carry harmful diseases that could devastate local aquatic life, or if the goldfish might actually be invasive pests.
But soon, thanks to tools being developed at the University of Canberra by the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions, officials only need a sample of water in the bag to detect diseases or discover if the fish aren't what they seem to be.
The EcoDNA research team are developing "environmental DNA" or "eDNA" tests, using DNA to detect single or multiple species from samples.
Researcher Dr Alejandro Trujillo-Gonzalez said it allowed biosecurity agents to rely on genetic information, not just their opinion.
'It's just taking the lab outside I guess," Dr Trujillo-Gonzalez said.
"The problem is that when fish arrive at border control ... like goldfish , they come in this five-litre bag and there's hundreds of fish in there."
"So visually inspecting a bag of fish ... is not something you could actually do.
"[Now] you no longer have to rely on your opinion of what one fish looks like."
But the tool isn't just able to be used in water. It can also be used to detect trace DNA on luggage or in the field.
Conservationists will be able to test rivers or lakes to see if invasive species are there.
Behind the simple test though, is complex DNA. The tool takes the water - or air or soil - and then scans it for the DNA of exotic species or harmful diseases.
"Sequencing" or scanning DNA, with its billions of lines of "code", requires a lot of computer power.
When you imagine DNA in the double-helix shape in which it is normally visualised, the ladder rungs coiling up it are base pairs. These base pairs operate like computer code, except with the letters A, T, G and C, not ones and zeroes.
The letter A can only match with T, and G with C,and it's the way they're combined and the order they're in that makes DNA unique. DNA consists of billions of these base pairs.
The research team's lead Professor Dianne Gleeson said in the '90s, sequencing just 100 base pairs would take two weeks on massive, desk-sized supercomputers.
But now, because of advances in computing technology, Professor Gleeson and her team can scan millions of base pairs in three hours on a portable computer slightly bigger than a fist.
The set up also includes a device no bigger than a smartphone. It samples the DNA and feeds the information to the computer, which sequences all this info onto Dr Trujillo-Gonzalez's computer via Wi-Fi.
Professor Gleeson said because of how portable these new computers were and how easy it was to perform the test, they could be used by anyone. Previously, researchers had to go out to the field, get samples and then go back to the lab.
"It makes the invisible, visible," she said.