Comparative performances of DNA barcoding across insect orders

Background: Previous studies on insect DNA barcoding provide contradictory results and suggest not consistent performances across orders. This work aims at providing a general evaluation of insect DNA barcoding and "minibarcoding" by performing simulations on a large database of 15,948 DNA barcodes. We compared the proportions of correctly identified queries across a) six insect orders (Coleoptera, Diptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Orthoptera), b) four identification criteria (Best Match: BM; Best Close Match: BCM; All Species Barcodes: ASB; tree-based identification: NJT), and c) reference databases with different taxon coverage (100, 500, 1,000, 1,500 and 1,995 insect species). Results: Analysis of variance revealed highly significant differences among ID criteria and insect orders. A posteriori comparisons of means showed that NJT had always a significantly lower identification success (NJT = 0.656, S.D. = 0.118) compared to both BM and BCM (BM = 0.948, S.D...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Massimiliano Virgilio, Thierry Backeljau, Bruno Nevado, Marc De Meyer
• Keywords: BMCBI 2010, Insect, Insect Orders, Reference Database