GenBank’s reliability is uncertain for biodiversity researchers seeking species-level assignment for eDNA

Abstract

Leray et al. (1) reassuringly conclude that “GenBank is a reliable resource for 21st century biodiversity research” based on an important quantitative assessment of its taxonomic accuracy. However, their insightful analysis focuses only on taxonomic levels above species. GenBank (2) is the key reference database for the growing fields of eDNA and metabarcoding, in which studies frequently report species-level sequence identities (e.g., refs. 3⇓–5). Thus, the reliability of GenBank for species identification should be evaluated before drawing sweeping conclusions about its robustness for biodiversity research. To assess possible sources of error for species assignment, we created an example dataset comprising all mitochondrial COI sequences available on GenBank for 25 marine species in California’s commercial fisheries and 18 common mid-Atlantic fishery species. Applying filtering criteria used by Leray et al. (1), we restricted sequence length to 100 to 2,000 base … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: locatelli{at}psu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1