Taxonomic reliability of DNA sequences in public sequence databases: a fungal perspective.

ABSTRACT:

Background

DNA sequences are increasingly seen as one of the primary information sources for species identification in many organism groups. Such approaches, popularly known as barcoding, are underpinned by the assumption that the reference databases used for comparison are sufficiently complete and feature correctly and informatively annotated entries.

Methodology/principal findings

The present study uses a large set of fungal DNA sequences from the inclusive International Nucleotide Sequence Database to show that the taxon sampling of fungi is far from complete, that about 20% of the entries may be incorrectly identified to species level, and that the majority of entries lack descriptive and up-to-date annotations.

Conclusions

The problems with taxonomic reliability

SUBMITTER: Nilsson RH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1762357 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature