The Gastropoda is one of the best studied classes of marine invertebrates. Yet, most species have been delimited based on morphology only. The application of DNA barcodes has shown to be greatly useful to help delimiting species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnelid polychaetes have been seldom the focus of dedicated DNA barcoding studies, despite their ecological relevance and often dominance, particularly in soft-bottom estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems. Here, we report the first assessment of the performance of DNA barcodes in the discrimination of shallow water polychaete species from the southern European Atlantic coast, focusing on specimens collected in estuaries and coastal ecosystems of Portugal. We analysed cytochrome oxidase I DNA barcodes (COI-5P) from 164 specimens, which were assigned to 51 morphospecies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Building reference libraries of DNA barcodes is relatively straightforward when specifically designed primers are available to amplify the COI-5P region from a relatively narrow taxonomic group (e.g. single class or single order).
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