Benchmarking the Taxonomic Resolution of Fish eDNA Metabarcodes Against COI Barcodes.

ABSTRACT: Even though environmental DNA metabarcoding is revolutionizing biomonitoring, many critical steps remain unstandardized, leading to arbitrary choices, particularly regarding the selection of metabarcode, clustering method and similarity threshold, among others. Additionally, these studies were hindered by biases resulting from the presence of mislabeled sequences in international databases such as GenBank and the lack of explicit definitions for taxonomic resolution. To address these issues, we developed a robust framework to compare the performance of 22 metabarcodes derived from the same mitogenomes (all available for Actinopterygians in NCBI) against a standardized taxonomic baseline based on COI Barcode Index Numbers (BINs). This framework allows for the separate quantification of over

SUBMITTER: Ruiz E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12627918 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature