Abstract
Land plants underpin a multitude of ecosystem functions, support human livelihoods and represent a critically important component of terrestrial biodiversity—yet many tens of thousands of species await discovery, and plant identification remains a substantial challenge, especially where material is juvenile, fragmented or processed. In this opinion article, we tackle two main topics. Firstly, we provide a short summary of the strengths and limitations of plant DNA barcoding for addressing these issues. Secondly, we discuss options for enhancing current plant barcodes, focusing on increasing discriminatory power via either gene capture of nuclear markers or genome skimming. The former has the advantage of establishing a defined set of target loci maximizing efficiency of sequencing effort, data storage and analysis. The challenge is developing a probe set for large numbers of nuclear markers that works over sufficient phylogenetic breadth. Genome skimming has the advantage of using existing protocols and being backward compatible with existing barcodes; and the depth of sequence coverage can be increased as sequencing costs fall. Its non-targeted nature does, however, present a major informatics challenge for upscaling to large sample sets.This article is part of the themed issue ‘From DNA barcodes to biomes’.
Highlights
Despite centuries of taxonomic effort, the characterization of plant species diversity remains a substantial and important challenge
Plants are undoubtedly well understood compared to mega-diverse groups like insects, recent estimates suggest that around 70 000 flowering-plant species await discovery [1]
We summarize the extent to which DNA barcoding of plants [3] is providing practical progress to address these challenges and explore the opportunities presented by the ongoing development of new sequencing technologies
Summary
Despite centuries of taxonomic effort, the characterization of plant species diversity remains a substantial and important challenge. Beyond finding new species, existing taxonomic accounts need reconciling and updating, and there is the wider practical challenge of assigning unidentified specimens to known species. This latter point is pertinent where the available material is sub-optimal (e.g. juvenile, fragmented, processed) or where available levels of taxonomic expertise are low. We summarize the extent to which DNA barcoding of plants [3] is providing practical progress to address these challenges and explore the opportunities presented by the ongoing development of new sequencing technologies
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