This recent paper (An update on DNA barcoding: low species coverage and numerous unidentified sequences; published in Cladistics) on an update of the Global DNA barcoding effort should be a real eye-opener to all people who love the NCBI Genbank and the process and openness of science, and especially to taxonomists.
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So the paper published in cladistics, looks at the claims of these “barcoders” and find some problems. They check whether:
- This project lived up to its initial speech act? (species coverage problem)
- Is it progressing scientifically? (“taxonomy” wise is it 100% percent right?)
Well, the answers are in the negative.They find ~60,000 “metazoa” species’ barcodes in the NCBI database, which is well below the number of 10-20 million total species on earth (some claims are less but see the link). This is despite having substantial funding from the governments for the barcoding initiative. This paper says that they (Barcoding consortium) received $80 million from the Canadian government, we know about many other sources where every small barcoder gets tens of millions.....In short, DNA barcoding has performed below par, and their quest to barcode all species has failed at least until now. The main problems could be that they did not have trained taxonomists in their ranks. They are against taxonomy using morphological identification, thus these taxonomists distance themselves from barcoding, and barcoders know little taxonomy to correctly identify a species to its specific level. If barcoders say that they found cryptic diversity that was deposited as “sp.” in databases, then why 1000 specimens (with <1% identity), and I would also ask those people to read better about species delimitation methods.
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