Most soil and litter arthropods are unidentifable based on current DNA barcode reference libraries  

作　　者：Ernesto Recuero Frank E.Etzler Michael S.Caterino 

机构地区：[1]Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences,Clemson University,277 Poole Agricultural Center,Clemson,SC 29634,USA [2]Natural Resource Section,Montana Department of Agriculture,302 N Roberts St,Helena,MT 59601,USA

出　　处：《Current Zoology》2024年第5期637-646,共10页动物学报（英文版）

基　　金：funded by the U.S.National Science Foundation(Award DEB-1916263 to M.S.C.);the Clemson University Experiment Station(SC-1700596 to M.S.C.).

摘　　要：We are far from knowing all species living on the planet.Understanding biodiversity is demanding and requires time and expertise.Most groups are understudied given problems of identifying and delimiting species.DNA barcoding emerged to overcome some of the difficulties in identi-fying species.Its limitations derive from incomplete taxonomic knowledge and the lack of comprehensive DNA barcode libraries for so many taxonomic groups.Here,we evaluate how useful barcoding is for identifying arthropods from highly diverse leaf litter communities in the south-ern Appalachian Mountains(USA).We used 3 reference databases and several automated classification methods on a data set including several arthropod groups.Acari,Araneae,Collembola,Coleoptera,Diptera,and Hymenoptera were well represented,showing different performances across methods and databases.Spiders performed the best,with correct identification rates to species and genus levels of~50%across data-bases.Springtails performed poorly,no barcodes were identified to species or genus.Other groups showed poor to mediocre performance,from around 3%(mites)to 20%(beetles)correctly identified barcodes to species,but also with some false identifications.In general,BOLD-based identification offered the best identification results but,in all cases except spiders,performance is poor,with less than a fifth of specimens correctly identified to genus or species.Our results indicate that the soil arthropod fauna is still insufficiently documented,with many species unrepresented in DNA barcode libraries.More effort toward integrative taxonomic characterization is needed to complete our reference libraries before we can rely on DNAbarcoding as a universally applicable identification method.

关 键 词：ARTHROPODA automated identification DNA barcoding databases TAXONOMY taxonomic impediment 

分 类 号：Q96[生物学—昆虫学]