I’m a late adopter of DNA barcoding. As a botanist it has often felt that DNA barcoding wasn’t really for me. Unlike in animals, where the mitochondrial gene CO1 often tracks species boundaries, in plants, there is rarely an exact match between DNA barcode sequence and plant species identity. A more general issue is that the use of one or a few regions of non-recombining organellar DNA just doesn’t cut it for answering the population genetic questions I’m most interested in.
But it’s now becoming clear that the scalability of DNA barcoding that allows it to be used on hundreds or thousands of specimens at a reasonable cost may make it a primary tool to accelerate species discovery and to describe biodiversity patterns in the face of massive species extinctions. Perhaps equally important to me is that the plant DNA barcode isn’t set in stone and new sequencing technologies will allow us to find better options for using DNA to tell plant species apart (Hollingsworth et al., 2016).
Given my new-found enthusiasm for DNA barcoding, last month I went to the 8thInternational Barcoding of Life Conference in Trondheim, Norway, to find out the new developments in this field. Here’s what I learnt:
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