Biodiv Sci ›› 2019, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (5): 526-533.  DOI: 10.17520/biods.2018209

Special Issue: 物种形成与系统进化

• Reviews • Previous Articles     Next Articles

DNA barcoding and emerging reference construction and data analysis technologies

Liu Shanlin()   

  1. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Food Nutrition and Human Health, College of Plant Protection, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193
  • Received:2018-07-30 Accepted:2018-12-25 Online:2019-05-20 Published:2019-05-20
  • Contact: Liu Shanlin

Abstract:

DNA barcoding has been growing exponentially in terms of the number of barcode generated as well as its applications, e.g. as conservation tools in: species identification for damaged specimens, diet analysis from gut content and feces, biodiversity assessment from environmental DNA (eDNA), bulk arthropod samples or invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA). These applications often require coupling with high throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies, and when done so are referred to as metabarcoding. Here, we discuss the methods used to generate reference barcodes using cost-efficient HTS platforms, and introduce several rules-of-thumb and some widely-used tools to conduct data quality control, denoising, and Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) clustering. We hope this review will help readers better understand how these emerging technologies can be implemented alongside existing technologies to accelerate biodiversity assessments in an accurate and efficient way.

Key words: DNA barcoding, OTUs, clustering, metabarcoding, high throughput sequencing