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Item Proceedings of the dna barcording to combat wildlife crime workshop held at Arusha Institute of Accountancy, Arusha 19 th May 2016.(USAID, 2016-05-19) Mutayoba, B. M.; Kitimu, S. R.; Kinimi, E. R.Poaching for both meat and trophy has always been a major challenge in conservation history. Illegal trade in wildlife and its products affect the survival of magnitude number of species. The population of rhinos and elephants for instance has declined in recent years as a result of escalation in organized trade in their products. This has necessitated many states to take active measures to protect their biodiversity in recent years.However, wildlife criminals (poachers and traffickers) continue to develop new ways to circumvent detection and prosecution. Crime investigators on the other hand fail to hold these criminals responsible with confidence due to lack of reliable forensic tools admissible in courts of law. The prosecutors try to prove that the suspects have committed crimes on wildlife but fail because criminals tried to remove overtindicative morphological features specific to poached animals. Over the recent years, this illegal wildlife poaching has turned into being a highly profitable business worldwide with remarkably low risks as trials of illegal wildlife traffickers are rare, largely because law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judicial systems typically consider such crime a low priority. Large volumes of wildlife including those already at risk are being illegally poached and traded and if this trend is unabated it threatens future survival of some key species in East Africa region and beyond. To overt these challenges scientists are racing in arms to develop highly sensitive, accurate and high throughput DNA based techniques to mitigate these challenges. One of the leading examples of this development is the institution of a standardized global DNA- based barcode identification system which provides a simple, universal tool for the identification of wildlife species and their products.DNA barcoding has now become an accepted and commonly used method for species identification practiced by taxonomists, ecologists, forensic scientists and other researchers. A Google-supported Barcode of Wildlife Project (BWP) hosted by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,successively initiated these initiatives in Kenya since 2012. Recently, BWP as expanded these training and technical assistance to new participants in Tanzania through the recently funded USAID-PEER project since 2015. The new participating institutions are Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) and Tanzania Wildlife Institute (TAWIRI)Item Genome sequence of Mycobacterium yongonense RT 955-2015 isolate from a patient misdiagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: First clinical detection in Tanzania(Elsevier Ltd, 2018) Mnyambwaa, N. P.; Jin Kima, D; Ngadayab, E; Chunc, J; min Hac, S; Petruckaa, P; Afddo, K. K; Kazwala, R.R.; Mfinanga, S.GBackground: Mycobacterium yongonense is a recently described novel species belonging to Mycobacterium avium complex, which is the most prevalent aetiology of non-tuberculous mycobacteria associated with pulmonary infections, and poses tuberculosis diagnostic challenges in high-burden, resource-con- strained settings. Methods: Whole genome shotgun sequencing and comparative microbial genomic analyses were used to characterize the isolate from a patient diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) after relapse. Results: The genome sequence of the first case of M. yongonense (M. yongonense RT 955-2015) in Tanzania is presented. Sequence analysis revealed that the RT 955-2015 strain had a high similarity to M. yongonense 05-1390(T) (98.74%) and Mycobacterium chimaera DSM 44623(T) (98%). Its 16S rRNA showed similarity to Mycobacterium paraintracellulare KCTC 290849(T) (100%), Mycobacterium intracellulare ATCC 13950(T) (100%), M. chimaera DSM 44623(T) (99.9%), and M. yongonense 05-1390(T) (98%). The strain exhibited a substantially different rpoB sequence to that of M. yongonense 05-1390 (95.16%), but closely related to that of M. chimaera DSM 44623(T) (99.86%), M. intracellulare ATCC 13950(T), (99.53%), and M. paraintracellulare KCTC 290849(T) (99.53%). Conclusions: In light of the OrthoANI algorithm and phylogenetic analysis, it was concluded that the isolate was M. yongonense Type II genotype, which is an indication that the patient was misdiagnosed with TB/MDR-TB and received inappropriate treatment. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license