omearabrian

There are many murders in the US. Some, involving some combination of wealth / fame / notoriety, like this one, get wall to wall coverage. Others get very little attention. As someone on the sensational crime beat, how do you feel about this? Do you see this changing?

That sort of thing is done sometimes for bacteria. For insects, this approach often uses mitochondrial DNA and is known as DNA barcoding. See http://www.barcodeoflife.org/content/about/what-dna-barcoding for more information. This is controversial in the field: it has helped discover some species that were mistakenly put as one species, but there's a gray area regarding how much difference is enough. You and I probably differ at a few sites in the mitochondrial gene used most often, you and a chimp differ at a lot more. But there's no magic value (say, 3% different) at which two things can safely be separated into different species. So scientists prefer to use multiple lines of evidence, rather than a single sequence, but some are willing to do as you suggest.