The Importance Of DNA Barcoding

There is enormous diversity in number and types of organisms present on earth. It is estimated that there may be around 10-100million species on earth, but only very small portion of that has been described (May, R. M. 1988). The basic criteria for species identification till last century were morphological characters which estimated approximately 1.7million species on earth. Defining a species is a very tedious task and various ecologists and evolutionary biologists have never agreed on what a species is (M. Blaxter, 2003).

Why we need DNA Barcoding?

Some of the key challenges against today’s society are various crucial biological issues such as the conservation of biodiversity, to ensure biosecurity and to limit bio piracy. The accurate biological

But, in DNA barcoding the molecules have been used on a large scale and standardized for the first time. DNA barcoding has created some controversies in the taxonomy. Some taxonomists argue that DNA barcoding is not same as DNA taxonomy. Traditional taxonomists use multiple traits to delineate species. However, DNA barcoding is based upon a single region in the genome (e.g. CO1 in animals) which renders DNA barcoding unreliable and prone to errors in species identification (DasMahapatra and Mallet, 2006). This implies that not a single gene is adequate for DNA barcoding of all organisms. DNA barcoding does not depict the tree of life. The clusters generated by DNA barcodes do not represent phylogenetic trees. In plants, complex evolutionary processes such as hybridization and polyploidy are very common; due to which species are very hard to delineate via DNA

BOLD (Barcode of Life Data Systems) – BOLD is an assembly of a reference library of barcode sequences which assembles molecular, morphological and distributional data. It provides online platform for analyses of DNA sequences. It is a repository for the specimen and sequence records that form the basic data unit of all barcode studies. It aids the management, quality assurance and analysis of barcode data and provides a platform for collaboration across research communities worldwide by joining flexible security and data entry features with web-based delivery (S. RatnaSingham and P. D. N Hebert, 2007; http://www.barcoding.si.edu, www.Boldsystems.org