Potential efficacy of mitochondrial genes for animal DNA barcoding: a case study using eutherian mammals

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Stephen L Cameron¹  Aibing Zhang²  Chaodong Zhu³  Yanzhou Zhang³  Arong Luo⁴  Simon YW Ho⁵  Weifeng Shi⁶  Weijun Xu⁷ 

[1] Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO Entomology, 2601, Canberra, ACT, Australia;College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, 100048, Beijing, P.R. China;Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing, P.R. China;Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing, P.R. China;Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, P.R. China;School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, 2006, Sydney, NSW, Australia;UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Sciences, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland;Zhongbei College, Nanjing Normal University, 210046, Nanjing, P.R. China;

关键词: High Taxonomic Level;    Interspecific Variability;    Ursus Arctos;    Interspecific Distance;    Intraspecific Distance;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-12-84

 received in 2010-07-29, accepted in 2011-01-28,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA well-informed choice of genetic locus is central to the efficacy of DNA barcoding. Current DNA barcoding in animals involves the use of the 5' half of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase 1 gene (CO1) to diagnose and delimit species. However, there is no compelling a priori reason for the exclusive focus on this region, and it has been shown that it performs poorly for certain animal groups. To explore alternative mitochondrial barcoding regions, we compared the efficacy of the universal CO1 barcoding region with the other mitochondrial protein-coding genes in eutherian mammals. Four criteria were used for this comparison: the number of recovered species, sequence variability within and between species, resolution to taxonomic levels above that of species, and the degree of mutational saturation.ResultsBased on 1,179 mitochondrial genomes of eutherians, we found that the universal CO1 barcoding region is a good representative of mitochondrial genes as a whole because the high species-recovery rate (> 90%) was similar to that of other mitochondrial genes, and there were no significant differences in intra- or interspecific variability among genes. However, an overlap between intra- and interspecific variability was still problematic for all mitochondrial genes. Our results also demonstrated that any choice of mitochondrial gene for DNA barcoding failed to offer significant resolution at higher taxonomic levels.ConclusionsWe suggest that the CO1 barcoding region, the universal DNA barcode, is preferred among the mitochondrial protein-coding genes as a molecular diagnostic at least for eutherian species identification. Nevertheless, DNA barcoding with this marker may still be problematic for certain eutherian taxa and our approach can be used to test potential barcoding loci for such groups.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Luo et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.