Taxonomic reliability of DNA sequences in public sequence databases: A fungal perspective
Journal article, 2006

Background DNA sequences are increasingly seen as one of the primary information sources for species identification in many organism groups. Such approaches, popularly known as barcoding, are underpinned by the assumption that the reference databases used for comparison are sufficiently complete and feature correctly and informatively annotated entries. Methodology/Principal Findings The present study uses a large set of fungal DNA sequences from the inclusive International Nucleotide Sequence Database to show that the taxon sampling of fungi is far from complete, that about 20% of the entries may be incorrectly identified to species level, and that the majority of entries lack descriptive and up-to-date annotations. Conclusions The problems with taxonomic reliability and insufficient annotations in public DNA repositories form a tangible obstacle to sequence-based species identification, and it is manifest that the greatest challenges to biological barcoding will be of taxonomical, rather than technical, nature.

Author

R. Henrik Nilsson

University of Gothenburg

Martin Ryberg

University of Gothenburg

Erik Kristiansson

University of Gothenburg

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematical Statistics

Kessy Abarenkov

University of Tartu

Karl-Henrik Larsson

University of Gothenburg

Urmas Kõljalg

University of Tartu

PLoS ONE

1932-6203 (ISSN) 19326203 (eISSN)

Vol. 1 1 e59- e59

Subject Categories

Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0000059

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6